Savoy's murdered traveler: Another historical 'X-File'

Right on the side of Route 116 as it winds through the town of Savoy, there is a tiny cemetery rising up around a tomb built into the hillside. The plot itself is actually called Tomb Cemetery, and it holds a couple of dozen stones marking burials from the mid 1800s into the early 20th century.

The tomb itself is empty. It was built by a prominent early settler of the town, but he is not interred there. Unbeknownst even to many Savoy residents, the mystery surrounding this empty tomb is closely tied to the town's favorite legend.

It's a story that's been around since the 19th century, in print since at least the 1930s and still very much in circulation. In fact, I heard a version of it within a couple of minutes of asking about town history on a recent visit to the general store.

Recorded many times, the basic legend goes as follows: One dark and stormy night, a wealthy traveler arrived on horseback to put up at the old tavern. When morning came, he was nowhere to be seen, and his bed had not been slept in. His horse was found the next day in a nearby field with a terrible gash in its neck.

Townspeople suspected the innkeeper of foul play. Without a

body or any other proof, though, no charges were brought. Soon after, bloodstains began to appear on the stairs leading to the second floor, and they could not be removed. Strange lights were seen in the window of the room the stranger was said to be slain in, and sometimes even a gory apparition with hollow eyes was spotted.

The tale is most often attributed to the 1830s and set in the original Bowker Tavern, also known as the Bowker Hotel. Liberty Bowker began leasing a tavern along what is now Main Street in 1823, and it grew increasingly prosperous until he sold it to his son Calvin in 1841. The original structure burned down sometime after that, and it was rebuilt bigger and grander, with many rooms and famous trout dinners drawing crowds from North

Adams and Williamstown nightly. This second Bowker Hotel burned down in 1894. Savoy's current general store is built over the foundation, and charred stone can still be seen in the cellar, according to Gail Carlow, who runs the store with her husband.

In recent decades, some versions of the tale place it next door to the store, in what was once the Mason Hotel. The Mason Hotel ran on and off from 1833 until the 1920s; it is now a private residence.

A closer examination of Savoy history is illuminating. The first town history, written by H.E. Miller in 1879, makes a brief reference to the "ruins of the famous haunted house." Neither the Bowker nor Mason buildings would have been in ruins at the time his history was written, but an earlier establishment, called the Williams Tavern, fits the legend perfectly. In fact, the history surrounding this, Savoy's first inn facility, suggests that the long-running town legend may have a basis in very real events.

The story of the tavern begins with Joseph Williams, who arrived from Taunton with his three sons in 1780. One of those sons, William, built the inn on his father's property and opened for business around 1794. Four years later, he relinquished the business to his father.

Joseph Williams, along with his partner Jacob Blake, was involved in a wide variety of business dealings, including half the real estate sales in town. Not all of these transactions appear to have been legitimate; at least one unhappy associate had to set the authorities on Williams for money owed him.

Around 1815, Jacob Blake died, but Williams remained close with his widow, Olive. Three years later, Joseph inexplicably began selling off his many land holdings, all except the lot where he had built the tomb in question. This he reserved for himself and the widow Blake, according to a notation in the deed. Virtually everything else he sold, sometimes at an apparent loss, up until 1823, after which there is no more mention of him in records.

Olive Blake, meanwhile, was swept up in the Shaker missionary zeal that gripped the town during those years. She eventually relocated, along with her daughter Rhoda, to the Shaker community in Mount Lebanon, along with dozens of other Savoy residents. Her daughter Rhoda became a prominent Shaker sister, holding many important offices in the community and eventually penning an autobiography profiling her life and experiences. It is in this document that we find an account of Joseph Williams that may shed a great deal of light on the oft-told haunted tavern tale.

Rhoda refers to a man arriving on horseback to the tavern one evening. He checked in, but before going to his room demanded to see Williams and was taken to his nearby home. Soon, angry voices could be heard coming from the house. Then there was silence. In the morning, Rhoda says, it was found that the man's room had not been slept in, and no sign of him could be found save his horse, which remained in the stable for days unclaimed.

After this, many people noticed a decline in Williams' health, and he seemed always distracted, even depressed. It was during this period that he sold off nearly all of his land. Finally, according to Blake's account, he was standing by his fire one night, when he fell and was "consumed by the flames." He ran from his house to the nearby river, extinguishing himself, but died shortly after.

Curiously, no one seems to know where his body is buried. The tomb, if it was ever used, is currently empty, and inscriptions from Savoy's 21 small cemeteries show no sign of Joseph Williams. Olive Blake moved to Mount Lebanon and is no doubt interred in the Shaker burial ground there.

What really happened to the unnamed traveler that came to Savoy that fateful night? Where is Joseph Williams, and why does his elaborate tomb remain empty to this day? We may never know more about these questions than we do now. As for Williams Tavern, the property was bought in 1824 by Liberty Bowker, whose grave can be found there in Tomb Cemetery. Today, Route 116 passes right through where the building stood. Only the empty tomb remains to tantalize us with its enigmas.

That and the legend of the murdered traveler, which is as alive today as it ever was.

Joe Durwin is a longtime local mystery monger. Send tips on haunted places, unexplained occurrences, rumors and other accounts of the strange to mysterioushills@gmail.com

Related Anecdotes:

-The same sort of “lights” that legend describes being seen in the Williams Tavern after the suspected murder were also reported by Shakers in their documents, in particular at the nearby widow Olive Blake’s house. The tavern incident took place at the peak of Shaker revivalism in Savoy, and the lights were seen by them as a sign of faith and devotion.

-In 1878, Tomb Cemetery was desecrated by a very eloquent vandal. Thirty nine headstones were broken or tipped, and across the ground, a very large sheet of brown paper had been laid. On it was an original nine stanza poem entitled “The Red Dragon,” which predicted a second Civil War, to which the one just passed was “only a sample.” It was signed The Tramp. Text of the poem has not survived, but it was described as being written in excellent penmanship and grammar, written by someone "well educated in history." The mystery was never solved.

Hauntings at the Red Lion Inn?

By Joe Durwin

Photos by Autumn Doyle
Advocate Weekly
Thursday, September 24

Arguably the most prominent historic landmark in Stockbridge, the Red Lion Inn has been in existence since 1773 when Silas Pepoon first established a tavern there.

Over the course of more than two centuries, it has gone from being a smoky saloon for fomenting revolution to one of the most famous and well-regarded historic lodgings in the region. It has been through 20 proprietors and three name changes, and it even has burned to the ground and been rebuilt. It has accommodated presidents, dignitaries and many celebrities.

Turns out, it may accommodate even stranger denizens.

I first encountered rumors of a haunting at the inn a couple of years ago, through some reviews on the popular site tripadvisor.com that referred to unusual activity in room 301. The first, in August 2004, was from a man who said he felt something touching his head and tugging the bed sheet. Almost one year to the day later, a second reviewer reported several times waking up to the feeling of having their toes being pulled on, as well as the sound of footsteps and the sensation of an unseen force fluffing up the comforter.

A month later, a third review described the guest being woken all night by cover-pulling from the foot of the bed. When the man turned to look, he saw a man in a top hat and "olden day attire," who then vanished in a white mist.

This, it seems, is not the only part of the inn said to be haunted. Guests have told staff of unusual sightings in other rooms, and one former housekeeper stated there had been rumors among some of the cleaning staff going back at least a decade about the whole fourth floor being haunted. In addition to the man in the top hat, there are vague rumors about a ghostly young girl carrying flowers.

One intriguing story can be found in the current edition of the inn's "Stories," a courtesy booklet of anecdotes penned by former guests recalling their experiences staying there. In it, one Sheryl Ciccarelli recounts an incident taking place in Room 424. One night in April 2003, she awoke quite suddenly to an overwhelming feeling that someone - or something - stood over her bed. Looking at the clock as she woke her husband, she noted the time: 1:35 a.m. In the morning, they discovered that their daughter had left them a message to tell them that a rainstorm had knocked the power lines out to their house, causing a shower of sparks and a great commotion in the neighborhood. The time of her call? 1:35 a.m.

Other miscellaneous incidents have been mentioned in various other parts of the complex. The most significant involves a gentleman who asked to be relocated from his room, he said, because of the sheer number of "spirited" guests he encountered. The gentleman turned out to be celebrity medium James van Praagh.

Last year, Joseph Flammer and Diane Hill, a pair of ghost-hunters from Long Island, spent the night in room 301, bringing with them a variety of sophisticated equipment. In addition to a pervasive cold spot at the foot of the bed, they reported knocks coming from within the armoire adjacent to it. They also claim to have captured video recording an amorphous "something" sweeping across the room to bang into the camera tripod.

Intrigued, I wanted to see for myself what oddities room 301 might hold and made arrangements to rent the room. I arrived on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and quickly checked in. Room 301 is a bright, cozy little room at the southernmost end of the main building, with nothing overtly spooky about its appearance.

I immediately turned on a digital recorder and started snapping photos. I didn't expect anything terribly dramatic. Over the years I've visited more allegedly haunted places than I can count, and only a handful of times have things gotten very weird. It may be ghosts just don't like to deal with the press.

The only particularly curious thing observed during my stay involved certain electrical fluctuations. I'm not a professional "ghost-hunter" by any means, but I did happen to have an EMF detector on loan from a friend. In a nutshell, what this does is measure electromagnetic field fluctuations. Typically, these are emitted by electrical appliances, wiring and other such equipment. However, in one area of the floor between the foot of the bed and armoire, I got persistently high spikes, much higher than those closer to the TV and other electronics.

It would be difficult to completely rule out wiring or other mechanical emissions coming from under that area of the floor as a cause of these readings, but given the fact that most reports of odd phenomenon in 301 seem to involve that part of the room, it seems worth consideration.

So who or what might haunt the inn? My first thought was to look into the fire that leveled the building in 1896, but this is said to have resulted in no loss of lives. In 236 years of history, though, the inn has had many thousands of visitors and staff, and there's no real agreement on what era the alleged ghosts of the inn might hail from.

Could be there's just something in the name. In the process of scouring for data on the Stockbridge haunt, I was intrigued to find a profusion of haunted Red Lions. The 17th century Red Lion Inn of Avebury, Wiltshire, is widely held to be haunted by a former innkeeper, and the Red Lion in Gloucestershire has been said to feature the ghost of Anne Boleyn. Then there's London's Red Lion Square, where the shade of Oliver Cromwell is said to hang about, and the be-spooked Red Lion Hotel of Pontefract, Yorkshire. Back on this side of the pond, Chicago's Red Lion Pub is said to be frequented by half a dozen former patrons from various eras.

Is our Red Lion really haunted? According to Carol Cosco Baumann, director of marketing and communications, "Every now and then, we hear about a guest that has had an experience that they attribute to a ghostly presence. In the past four years, I can count the number of such instances on one hand. That said, we keep our minds open to the possibilities!"

Perhaps the best way to assuage your curiosity is to go see for yourself. I recommend room 301... just keep an eye on that strange spot at the foot of the bed.

Joe Durwin is a longtime local mystery monger. Send tips on haunted places, macabre sightings, curious artifacts, crackpot theories, pernicious rumors and other accounts of the strange to mysterioushills@gmail.com

Natural History of Anomalies

THESE MYSTERIOUS HILLS
Wonders and Mysteries of the Natural World
By Joe Durwin

This week marks the final installment of These Mysterious Hills as a regular column. While Advocate readers may hear from me again, from time to time, as strange new developments occur, or the occasional obscure case from the past emerges from some dark and dusty hiding place, its time as a regular, reoccurring source of folklore and forteana has run its course.

The simple fact of the matter is that there is not an endless supply of haunted places and unexplained occurrences, at least not in any one locality. People are always telling me they don’t know how I have come up with so many topics to write about, month after month. Usually I just nod and smile- because I don’t either, not really. I have no idea how I’ve managed to keep this going as long as I have.

One thing is certain: these hills have far more than their fair share of mysteries. Few regions can boast such a rich landscape of eerie lore and inherent curiosity. Nonetheless, there is still some limited room to swing a dead cat without hitting a ghost, a UFO, or Sasquatch. Weirdness, though pervasive, is finite, and this column has always had an inevitable end.

What I’ve enjoyed most about revisiting these subjects again and again are the human dimensions involved. For the most part, these accounts of local legends, historical mysteries and haunted places are human stories, stories about people who lived here, what they did and what they saw and what happened to them. In this final chapter, though, I turn the spotlight off humanity and onto the hills themselves, to the beautiful and mysterious landscape of the place itself. This time, I will let nature tell its story.

Despite the picturesque views and romanticism of the changing seasons, bizarre and unpleasant weather has always been a perennial topic in this area. On occasion, the tendency toward severe elements goes right off the grid, and conditions allow for meteorological occurrences of a more inexplicable nature.

On August 23, 1892, a large number of Pittsfield residents witnessed a cloud formation behaving in a most uncanny way in the midst of a hailstorm. The cloud was moving fast, and very low to the ground, when suddenly it tore asunder, with two parts blowing off in different directions. The larger part passed across the tops of some tall poplar trees, cleanly shaving the tops right off, as though an airborne lawnmower had passed by.

Another curious hailstorm struck Bennington on June 17, 1950, pelting the town with metal. Around noon that day, a heavy hail storm swept through town, and as the hail melted local people were perplexed to find that it had left tiny pieces of metal behind everywhere. Word spread quickly, even garnering some national attention from Life magazine. Meteorologists in Boston and Albany for the most part scoffed, calling the phenomenon impossible.

Still, this is not the worst form of precipitation seen hereabouts. On March 27, 1960, Mrs. Larry Roche of Dalton heard what sounded like an explosion in her front yard. Running out to see about the commotion, she found a large hole containing three pieces of what had been a chunk of ice weighing over 30 pounds. There were no airplanes over the area at the time, and the ice bomb appeared to have fallen right out of a cloudless sky.

As if that was not enough, a hurricane of stones and mortar chunks hammered two buildings astride the border with Connecticut at Sage’s Ravine in 1802. For five days, stones struck from no identifiable source, destroying over 50 panes of glass but otherwise leaving the buildings largely unharmed. As similar bombardment occurred at the farm of Thomas Paddock in North Powna.l in 1879, where stones not only fell from the sky, but rolled upwards along the roof against gravity, and when picked up felt hot to the touch.

The local fauna has also been a dependable source of anomalous phenomena and bewildering behavior. Besides sightings of Bigfoot-style “wild men,” supposedly extinct catamounts, wolves, and even “demon dogs,” as described in past editions, there’ve also been a number of more documented oddities amongst known species.

One example is the two-headed calf born to A.J. Somers of Adams in September, 1896. Born alive, the calf also possessed six legs and two tails. The calf died a couple of days later, and it was said at the time that Somers intended to have it stuffed, but I do not know whether this taxidermy ever took place or not. Interestingly, the very same year, a kitten in North Adams was born with eight legs and two tails. All these appendages grew from one body, with only one head. The feline, quite alive, was briefly on display at Reeves’ Pool Room on Commercial Street.

It was also near North Adams, four years before, that a vast number of Hessian flies seem to have rained down from the sky. According to the Fall 1892 edition of the journal Insect Life, specimens of larvae were submitted by Professor S.F. Clark of Williams College, collected from the very surface of the snow immediately following a storm. Untold numbers of these insects were found living across acres of this snow. The scientific advisors of Insect Life presented this along with numerous other cases of flies and worms found on the snow’s surface that winter. Their explanation was that the larvae were tempted to the surface from their hibernation by a sudden warm day, only to be trapped by a sudden freeze or storm.

They admit that this will not suffice for many cases, which they attribute to air currents displacing these insect from more southern regions. This is the old Segregating Whirlwind Theory, trotted out as a last resort to explain (when simply ignoring will no longer suffice) the frequent rains of stones, frogs, fish, snails, snakes, or coins worldwide throughout history. The Segregating Whirlwind is that alleged atmospheric phenomenon in which a storm cloud manages to sweep up a large quantity of an animal or object all of a same type, without picking up any significant traces of any other kinds of fish, dirt, leaves, moss or other similarly light matter in the process. The Whirlwind then deposits these objects squarely –and often entirely unharmed, in the case of fish, frogs, etc— in an entirely different locale. Neat trick, that.

In 1806, a large insect ate its way out from deep within a grand wooden table in the home of Mr. P.S. Putnam of Williamstown. The table was made from an old apple tree cut down in 1786, when it was already 80 years old. In 1812, another ate its way out, and 1814, a third. This last one tunneled out from a spot 45 cortical layers into the table, meaning its egg originally was deposited in the wood more than 73 years before it hatched.

This last specimen measured an inch and a quarter. The owner had heard it chewing its way out for weeks before it emerged.

And there may be stranger creatures still. In April, 1890, a fisherman encountered a water snake said to have measured twenty-five feet long in one of the Twin Lakes. And just a few months ago, I received reports of an enormous unidentified animal in North Adams, a predatory beast able to fly but heavy enough to bend a metal railroad tie just standing on it.

These are just a few varied expressions of the often bizarre natural landscape of These Mysterious Hills. There are still more, here and in the back story of every city and town and county in America... so very many that it makes me wonder whether there is such a thing as ‘straight’ history at all…if that is not itself the mythical phenomenon.

But when you go to sleep tonight, remind yourself that it’s all ok. There’s no such thing as inexplicable forces, or impossible occurrences. Remind yourself that you don’t believe in that sort of thing. There are no ghosts, no ghouls, no monsters and no flying saucers, no matter how totally ubiquitous these things seem to be. No visions or miracles or meaningful coincidences. Everything is under control.

And remember, whatever cannot be properly observed, replicated, or explained or understood: just blame it on the weather.

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Joe Durwin is a Pittsfield native on an extended sabbatical in the desert, from which he will soon be returning. Always, always, always, send tips on haunted places, unexplained sightings, weird stories, ghost photos, bizarre gossip, odd experiences, cursed artifacts, crackpot theories, pernicious rumors, and accounts of the strange to: joe@durwin.net

As a final note, I’d like to thank the Advocate editors who have all been so marvelous to me: Glenn Drohan, Lani Stack, and Rebecca Dravis. Not every free weekly is willing to devote so much space, year after year, to meandering explorations of a region’s skeleton-filled closets, no matter how vital a part of the local story it may be.

"The Fosburgh Murder Mansion"

Back in 2005, I wrote about Greenwood, known more commonly as “the Old Britton Place,” one of Pittsfield’s most haunted houses of the 19th century. Greenwood burned down in 1890, but floating apparitions have been reported for more than 100 years all around the area of West Housatonic Street where it used to be. The Britton Place is not the only local haunted house to have slipped into the mists of local memory; a number of the old, empty structures that gave many of our forbearers restless chills as they passed by simply do not exist in the present day. Buildings burn, crumble into dereliction, or are demolished to make way for the more desired accommodations of the moment.

A local business stands on the spot where the Fosburgh house, one of Pittsfield’s most illustrious hauntings, once stood. Long before the old frame house on Tyler Street fell into abandonment and disrepair, becoming the subject of the muttered trepidation and the dares of neighborhood children, it was the site of one of the city’s most sensational murders. Indeed, the history of the entire house is wrapped up in one single mysterious night.

It was after two a.m., August 20, 1900, when the fire alarm rang out from the direction box 41 in front of the old Baptist church. The sound could be heard as far away as Dalton and Lenox. From all directions, men came spilling out of nearby houses, some of them still pulling on shoes and shirts.

As veteran Pittsfield journalist Haydn Mason recalled:

“By the time I got organized and on the scene, a strange sight greeted eyes expecting to see the center of the city in flames. Horses hitched to the exercise wagons the Fire department used in those days, were chomping at their bits. Men were excitedly muttering to each other in low voices. Firearms were being hurried over from the Pierson Hardware Store and handed out to men crowding into the wagon. From somebody I heard the word ‘murder’ and I learned that men were going out to guard the roads leading from town.”

Word spread quickly from there: the beautiful young May Fosburgh, 19, had been shot in the heart. As her hysterical family told those who rushed to help, three men with masks over their heads had broken in, firing on May when she blocked their path. Police Chief John Nicholson ordered every man in the department into duty, and a steady stream of volunteers were outfitted with shotguns in front of the hardware store. Nicholson declared the city surrounded, and the following evening was still taking on volunteers for what was called the most sensational manhunt in Pittsfield’s history, which included more than five hundred armed men.

The Fosburghs were a wealthy socialite family from Buffalo, New York, having only arrived a few months previously. R.L. Fosburgh & Son were contractors working on the construction of new buildings for the rapidly expanding General Electric Company. They had taken up residence in the house on the northwest corner of Tyler and Woodlawn Streets in order to be close to their work.

On the night of May’s death, there were several people in the house: her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Fosburgh, her brothers Robert S. and James Fosburgh, along with Robert’s wife, Amy, 13- year old Beatrice Fosburgh, and 16-year-old Bertha Sheldon, a house guest. As Robert Sr. later told police, around one o’clock in the morning he was woken by his wife, who asked him to investigate a noise. At this point, he saw two masked burglars, and while he grappled with one, the other knocked him unconscious. When he awoke, he found his wife in the hall bent over May’s body.

Robert Jr. reported being woken by the sound of a struggle and following it to the room shared by Beatrice and May, only to see one of the masked men fire on May in the hallway. After lowering her to the floor, he pursued the man into an unoccupied room where he saw three men in masks, who he failed to stop from escaping down from the second story window.

Chief Nicholson was unhappy with the discrepancy between the number of burglars in the accounts of Robert Sr. and Jr. Then again, this could be written off to the darkness or all three men not being in the room when the father was attacked. But there were other oddities, as well.

Robert Jr. had said that the man had shot May from several feet away, but the gunpowder burns on her nightgown seemed to indicate a discharge closer to one foot away. Also, there were signs of a struggle in Robert Jr.’s room (where they found a nightgown of Amy’s ripped to shreds) of which neither men had said anything. Meanwhile, Beatrice said that she had not seen the burglars, or her brother laying down May, but Bertha Sheldon’s account began with Beatrice exclaiming to her, “Burglars have been here and shot May!”

Finally, James recalled hearing nothing until he’d heard Amy come into his room screaming, “Jim! Jim! Your father’s gone crazy!”

A significant amount of cash and several prominently displayed items of jewelry remained untouched throughout parts of the house where the burglars were said to have been. A .44 revolver was found under Robert Sr.’s bed, but no sign of the murder weapon, a .22, was ever found.

Nonetheless, weeks after May’s death her brother, Robert S. Fosburgh, was indicted for manslaughter. During the trial the following July, the prosecution advanced the theory that he had come home drunk, fought with his father, and ultimately drawn a gun. May, attempting to intervene, was fatally shot.

The trial was widely depicted as a circus. Even before it began, the city received more than 500 letters requesting seating at the proceedings. Local feeling highly favored the possibility that the family had covered up the circumstances of May’s death to avoid scandal. Throughout the rest of the country, however, where the case was a major news story, the trial is depicted as a farce orchestrated against an innocent man by incompetent police unable to find the culprits and prosecutors desperate to close the case. The Daily People, a paper of the Socialist Labor Party, expressed their opinion candidly: “From beginning to end, the testimony was an insult to understanding: it was contradictory, it was flimsy, it was irrelevant.”

After eight days, Judge William B. Stevens ended the proceedings, instructing the jury to acquit Fosburgh. The family finished its work in Pittsfield and departed, never to return.

The house itself seems to have had a strange lingering effect on the minds of some Pittsfielders. No one lived long in the place after that, it would seem. Following the murder and indictment, it was briefly inhabited by owner Mrs. Castle, who put it on the market within months of the end of the trial.

Within its walls, it was rumored, May’s ghost wandered endlessly. Some said they felt a horrid presence just walking past. In its last occupation, it served as apartment housing. When Sun Oil proposed to demolish it in 1950 to put up a gas station, not a single voice objected. Indeed, the memory of the Fosburgh murder was still vivid fifty years after, and there was great enthusiasm for the proposal.

“I certainly am not one to vote in new gasoline stations,” said city councilman Leland C. Talbot, but I’ll certainly go along with this one if it means the city can get rid of that awful place.” The others unanimously echoed this sentiment.

So the run-down house was razed, a filling station put in its place, adjacent to what was then the Church of the Gospel (itself demolished in recent years). Today, the spot belongs to a chain windshield repair company.

As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, there have been no particular incidents of strangeness on the property in a half century or more. Unlike Greenwood, any ghosts that may have inhabited the “Fosburgh Murder Mansion” seem not to have outlived their original dwelling. For all the anxiety that the Fosburgh house may once have engendered, the corner is remarkably mundane today.

Except, of course, for the human mayhem spilling out from the bar across the street. But that’s another story entirely.

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Joe Durwin is a Pittsfield native currently on sabbatical in the desert. Send unexplained sightings, ghost stories, crackpot theories, bizarre gossip and accounts of the strange to joe@durwin.net

SEARLES CASTLE

http://www.advocateweekly.com/thesemysterioushills

THESE MYSTERIOUS HILLS
SCANDAL AND RUMOR SURROUND BARRINGTON'S HAUNTED CASTLE
By Joe Durwin


I have always had a soft spot for the many fine manor houses that dot the Berkshires, those opulent and gargantuan self-memorials that the uber-rich, with surreal modesty, called cottages. Though constructed in a range of different styles and gradients of grandeur, they all somehow bear the very distinct mark of the Gilded Age in which they were midwifed into existence.

Throughout that mythic era of vast fortunes, stretching for all practical purposes from the post-Civil War Reconstruction to the dawn of modern income taxes with the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, wealthy socialites and industrials descended on the Berkshires in waves. For a variety of factors, ranging from the area's established cultural pedigree and natural beauty, to the large-scale availability of fine marble and other crucial building materials, they raced to snatch up local land for their summer estates.

While the lion's share of these estates went up in Lenox and Stockbridge, it is Great Barrington that can boast possession of what is perhaps the most colorful and interesting of these palatial domains. In fact, it is one of the most frequent questions asked by travelers on their first visit to the town: "What's the deal with that castle?"

Indeed.

Kellogg Terrace, aka Barrington House, aka Searles' Castle, of late the John Dewey Academy campus, has been enshrouded in legend virtually since the time of its construction. Rumors of scandal, infidelity, fraud, and murder, have all at one point weaved their way into the castle's legacy, along with whispers of hidden staircases, secret tunnels and restless ghosts.

The castle's story revolves around Mary Hopkins Searles, born Mary Frances Sherwood in Great Barrington in 1826. As a girl, Mary attended the Kellogg School run by her aunts on the very land where the present mansion now stands. In 1854 she married Mark Hopkins, her first cousin and great grandson of Samuel Hopkins, the first Congregational minister in Great Barrington. Known for his skill at turning a profit, Mark became one of the "Big Four" founding owners of the Central Pacific Railroad.

At the time of his death in 1878, he left Mary with a fortune valued at around forty million dollars, equivalent to over 830 million in today's money. Following his death, Mary kept herself busy overseeing the completion of their mansion atop Nob Hill in San Francisco, begun in 1875 (destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, the Mark Hopkins Intercontinental Hotel is built on the spot it occupied).

In 1881, her last remaining Kellogg aunt died, leaving her the Great Barrington property. The widow Hopkins quickly set about preparations for the palatial chateau seen today, engaging the help of decorator Edward F. Searles, who had worked for her on the Nob Hill home. In the course of the four year, multi-million dollar construction of Kellogg Terrace, Mrs. Hopkins and Searles found themselves more and more in each other's company, and in 1887 they married.

He was 46, a comparatively modest decorator with a known taste for massive estate houses. She was 68, and the wealthiest woman in America at the time.

Naturally, people talked.

One of the most amusing stories that circulated was that Searles had in fact been pursuing the marital mother lode for some time, but continued to be gently rebuffed by the Mrs. Hopkins (it was even rumored that the widow favored a different suitor entirely). Finally, while seeing her off for the train to New York, he slung an arm around her waist and kissed her full on the mouth. The widow found herself faced with scandal, with half of Great Barrington society looking on. Without missing a beat, so the story goes, she loudly introduced her nearest companions to her fiancé, Edward Searles.

Such stories earned Searles the nickname "the Napoleon of love."
As for the house itself, it has been called the finest example of the French chateau period in America. The exterior was designed by the firm of McKim, Mead & White, and built from blue dolomite quarried on the property. The final structure measured 180 feet across and 100 deep, varying from four to six stories in height, with a total of 68,000 square feet.

The interior, with its many rooms and halls, was overseen by Searles, and outfitted lavishly in a dizzying variety of styles. Coming through the huge, German-made bronze doors that used to adorn the front entry, the early visitor came through the vestibule and into the great hall, paneled in English oak. This opens into the atrium, a vivid example of Greek Ionic architecture recreating the Erechtheum in Athens. The atrium is surrounded by 16 matched marble columns, with walls of rose ivory marble quarried in the Atlas Mountains of Africa.

According to legend, the eccentric Searles also oversaw the construction of a network of secret passageways and staircases throughout the mansion. In one version of the legend which appeared in a recent collection of folklore, Searles used one of these staircases to carry on an affair with one of the servants while Mrs. Searles, then sickly, remained bed-ridden in the master bedroom. In this version, Edward eventually poisoned the ailing Mrs. Hopkins Searles, but within weeks of her death both the maid and Searles died of accidents in the house. It almost goes without saying that all three haunt the manor to this day.



In fact, rumors of foul play surrounded the death of Mrs. Searles almost from the moment it occurred. The newlyweds took up residence at the castle (which Searles had renamed Barrington House) in 1887, and from the beginning their life together was shrouded in mystery. Only a very limited number of guests were invited to the few parties which took place there, a strange thing for such a significant estate. On the streets, Mrs. Hopkins Searles was always seen with a black parasol, and holding a black fan which obscured her face. And years later, former servants told of Edward's habit of constantly moving furniture and making loud noises throughout the house at night, something they believed he'd done to scare her.

According to her obituary, Mary Frances died on July 26, 1891 of complications with "dropsy" (edema) following a long bout with "the grip" (influenza), at Edward's Pine Lodge estate in Methuen Massachusetts. Her funeral was a small invitation-only affair held in the Methuen house, with no one admitted to the burial at a mausoleum constructed elsewhere on the grounds. In Great Barrington, rumors abounded that she'd actually been buried at night, on the grounds of the castle, with no one but servants present.

Whatever the circumstances of her death, the reading of her will was a very real bombshell. It awarded virtually everything, amounting to more than 50 million dollars and including a substantial part of Central Pacific Railroad, to Searles, specifically disinheriting her adopted son Timothy Hopkins. This lead to a lengthy and heavily publicized legal battle, as Timothy and a variety of other vague relations challenged the nature of her marriage to Searles.
Searles spent three full days testifying on the stand. With a candid eloquence that would have made Anna Nicole blush, he declared that he had married for love and for money, but love was the stronger motive. Later, he quietly settled with Timothy for a few million.

Searles spent less and less time in Great Barrington following Mary's death. In Windham, New Hampshire, he built a medieval castle based on Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire. The majority of the best furniture and treasures from the Barrington House were spirited away to his Methuen estate, or to their Fifth Avenue home in New York. Searles died in Methuen in 1920, sparking off another wave of legal claims from potential Hopkins heirs as the fortune changed hands again, the Great Barrington castle going to a business associate of Edward's named Arthur T. Walker.

In modern times, the existence of such truly excessive monument estates as single family homes –and seasonal ones at that- has become untenable, to some even unthinkable. One by one throughout the 20th century, the vast cottages of the Berkshires became resorts, schools, yoga centers. Barrington House was no exception. In the 1920s it was sold to Barrington School, and once again the Kellogg grounds became host to a girls' school. Through the fifties, the castle was owned by the Home Insurance Company and became a storage place for records they didn't want to lose in the event of a nuclear holocaust in New York.

One modern legend has it that in the late 1970s, a boy snuck into yet another secret tunnel, this one running from the basement out beneath the pond behind the castle. The tunnel caved in, killing him and flooding the basement. The tunnel was cemented shut, and the boy became yet another resident ghost.

Since 1984, the estate has been home to the John Dewey Academy, a preparatory school for troubled teens. After more than two decades there, the school is in transition, with the possibility of relocation imminent. The castle, valued in 2006 at 4.5 million dollars, must be sold. That's a whole other story, one which, as Thomas Bratter, founder and headmaster at the Academy, told me, in itself "borders on insanity."

With the future of the castle uncertain, what are we to make of the past? Did Edward Searles marry his wife for her money, and then kill her for it? Perhaps.

Then again, perhaps us common folk just can't help but be suspicious of what goes on with the people who live up in the castle.

-------
Joe Durwin is a Pittsfield native currently on sabbatical in the desert. Send unexplained sightings, ghost stories, bizarre gossip and accounts of the strange to joe@durwin.net


SELECTED SOURCES:

A History of Searles Castle in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, by Lila Parrish (1985)
Homes of the Berkshires 1870-1930, by Richard Jackson (2006)

Weird New England, by Joseph A. Citro (2005)

Berkshire Cottages: A Vanishing Era, by Carole Owens. (1984)

New York Times July 26, 1891

The Berkshire Eagle: July 7, 1962; November 21- 22, 1977

Mystery, Murder, and Mayhem Surround Area's Oldest Inn

http://advocateweekly.com/thesemysterioushills
By Joe Durwin

New Boston Inn, at the junction of routes 8 and 57 West in Sandisfield, is the oldest and longest-running Inn in the Berkshires. The Inn’s history begins about 270 years ago, when Daniel Brown, one of Sandisfield’s first settlers, built his home there in 1737. In 1760 it became a functioning tavern and respite for travelers passing through western Massachusetts. A few years later, it served as a meeting place and hospice for soldiers during the Revolution.

In the twentieth century, it played host to a number of notables: Ann Lindbergh stayed there while writing her memoirs, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton were frequently spotted in the tavern, and Bing Crosby is known to have popped his head in on occasion. During the tenure of Russell and Rosalind Chapin, who owned the place from the mid 1940s to the late ‘50’s, New Boston gained a reputation for exquisite food. Rosalind’s recipes were frequently raved about in the nationally syndicated column by culinary writer Gaynor Maddox.

Several interesting architectural features were built into the inn. Walls within were built at such an angle that doors would close on their own, and a slanted wall leaning out from the floor of the dining room helped ensure that snow would not build up at the windows. The tavern is walled with twenty-two inch planks of Kings Wood, so named because the oak they were cut from was illegally retained by colonists after being marked by royal deputies for export to England. The upstairs ballroom, with its barrel-vaulted ceiling, was originally suspended from chains, so the floor would give when filled with dancers.

Perhaps the most frequently discussed bit of historical background, and certainly the most relevant for the purpose of this column, is an obscure but sensational event said to have taken place in the summer of 1805. A young woman named Harriet, so the story goes, was preparing for her wedding at the Inn when a jealous suitor burst in with a gun, fatally wounding her. Ever since, some believe, the inn has been haunted by the memory of that tragic event. It is said that the shade of young Harriet, dressed in the bridal black typical of the day, wanders the halls and rooms, and that it is she who is responsible for the many strange occurrences reported there.

Strange voices and the sounds of footsteps are frequently reported, along with doors that refuse to open and music boxes that begin playing on their own are among the many disturbances cited. An even stranger account was given to me by current owner Barbara Colorio. During the summer of 2005, two hundred years after Harriet’s dreadful demise, another wedding was being held at New Boston Inn. Suddenly, all the fire alarms began going off, and could not be stopped. Even after disconnecting the system from the power and back up batteries, the blaring continued.

Considering how well known the story of Harriet’s murder has become, it is curious that so little in the way of specific information about the incident can be found. Though mentioned in various local histories, no further details are offered than those given here; Harriet’s last name, the name of her killer, and the exact date of the slaying are all among the facts shrouded in the fog of historical obscurity. The inn even offers a free night in the haunted ballroom for anyone who can supply these particulars; according to Local History librarian Ann-Marie Harris, the Berkshire Athenaeum fields several inquiries a year about this tantalizing mystery.

As if to make up for the lack of historical data surrounding Harriet’s death, New Boston Inn is one of the most heavily investigated of any haunted place in the county. A plethora of prominent ghost-hunting groups and paranormal researchers have visited this Sandisfield landmark, hoping to shed light on its spooky enigmas.

In 2004, the Inn was investigated by the O.R.I.O.N. Paranormal group, headed by Michael Sinclair. The O.R.I.O.N. group’s website features photos they believe indicate paranormal phenomena in the Inn, and Sinclair was so intrigued by the amount of activity there that he organized a second investigation, this time with the help of the team from The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS), stars of the popular television show Ghost-Hunters.

This subsequent exploration appeared on an episode of the show which aired on the Sci-Fi channel in December 2004. In it, the investigation by the TAPS team comes up with mixed results. They conclude that most of the photos of “orbs” or “ectoplasm” taken by the O.R.I.O.N. group could be attributed to bits of particulate matter from insulation blowing out from the ceiling, but are unable to posit viable explanations for other occurrences reported by witnesses. As a test, they place a pen in a certain location in a room which is then shut and locked, only to find that it has moved slightly when they return to that room.
Paranormal investigator and author Jeff Messenger also shared with me his experiences doing research on the inn. Last January he explored the place with Phantasm Psychic Research group, headed by David Considine. They monitored the interior for several hours with high tech equipment, but captured only one brief anomaly on film, “a twisting line of light that floated to the back of the room and faded away.”

Trying a more low-key approach for a second investigation, Messenger returned to the Inn in May without the rest of the team. Keeping an all-night vigil from room 7, he found the building much more active this second time. Though it was not windy that night, he heard repeated knocking sounds on the walls and ceiling. He even tried a “white noise” experiment in an attempt to snare some samples of Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP). This is a method by which paranormal investigators attempt to make recordings of spectral voices not ordinarily audible by capturing them against a background of white noise, such as from a detuned radio receiver. At one point in the night, he got a recording of a very faint female voice coming through the static, whispering “…I’m here.”

“None of this was proof positive of a haunting,” Messenger remarks, “but it certainly piqued my interest even more in the New Boston Inn.”

With a murky past, any number of reports of strange activity, and an owner who is very approachable on the subject New Boston Inn is a fertile ground for research, both scientific and historical. It remains a cornucopia of tantalizing secrets, just waiting for the right combination of luck and persistence to uncover them. On top of the thrill of discovering those secrets, there’s still the standing offer of a free night in the haunted ballroom, for anyone who can supply any more information about the ill-fated Harriet, or her jealous suitor…

Pittsfield Ghost Train

[late posting this here...]

http://www.advocateweekly.com/thesemysterioushills/ci_4705378

By JOE DURWIN
Thursday, November 23
My interest was aroused last week by debate over the cause of a mysterious noise heard by a number of Berkshire county residents.

The Berkshire Eagle reported that numerous locals had complained of a horrible sound emanating from the vicinity of the railroad tracks running through area. The noise was first reported by Christine McAllister of Pittsfield, who lives about a mile from the nearest tracks.

"It sounds like a UFO landing," McAllister said.

How could that not pique my interest?

Following the first complaint, other reports came in from every town in the central part of the county. Theories included a jet engine, construction equipment and a malfunctioning siren. From my secret bunker far away in Arizona, I, of course, pondered more esoteric possibilities.

In the end, the awful racket was found to be the result of a broken bearing on an engine belonging to the CSX Railroad. The engine was pulled and the necessary repairs made. So came to an end the mystery of the pernicious cacophony that had plagued the senses of citizens in almost half the county.

Meanwhile, the drama surrounding these complaints reminded me of an older, more curious phenomenon which has plagued local rail lines in the past - that of the Pittsfield Ghost Train. The story of the Ghost Train and its brief, but vivid, appearances has made its way into several magazine articles and a number of books on ghosts and hauntings, but for all the repetition and discussion in such circles, very little is known about it.

The story begins, as nearly as I can tell, in February 1958, at the Bridge Lunch, the diner which formerly occupied the corner of North Street and Eagle. John Quirk, then proprietor of the diner, along with his lunch customers, watched a steam locomotive come barreling down the tracks at a shocking speed, headed east. From his vantage point, Quirk could see the train in vivid detail, despite its extreme speed. He said the engine was pulling a baggage car and five or six coaches, and he could even see the coal in the tender.

When the strange train was reported to railroad officials, however, the residents were informed curtly that no train had passed by at that time. Furthermore, officials pointed out, no steam engine had operated on that line in many years.

About a month later, in early March, the mystery locomotive came rocketing under the North Street Bridge again, this time around 6:30 in the morning. It was witnessed this time by diner employees Steve Strauss and Timothy Koutsonecolis, along with a smattering of early-morning customers. The description matched the first sighting precisely: a steam locomotive hauling east at high speed, with a baggage car and half a dozen coaches trailing.

That was the last time anyone has formally come forward to report the mysterious train, as far as I've ever been able to ascertain. I've heard vague rumors of other sightings of a phantom steam engine along that line over the last few years, hazy allegations by friends of friends of friends, nothing worthy of investigation. I've also walked alongside that very same stretch of train track probably more than a thousand times in my youth, and I've yet to see anything that resembled the description given by the folks at the Bridge Lunch in '58, although I and others have observed that there often tends to be a far higher proportion of dead animals under the North Street bridge than under any of the parallel bridges in town.

Stories of phantom trains in general have been relatively common since the 19th century. As a class, they are sandwiched into an awkward and difficult to comprehend category of paranormal conveyances, including phantom ships (several of which have been alleged to roam the Bermuda Triangle), phantom planes, cars and even phantom covered wagons in the Old West. Some toss into this mixed bag the black Cadillacs driven by the Men in Black who plague UFO witnesses, and the mysterious vanishing vans mentioned in connection with worldwide sightings of "phantom clowns" as well as many cattle mutilations.

The phantom train phenomenon has often been said to be confined to the United States and Britain, suggesting it may have some specific cultural significance as folklore. However, international cases, though rarer, do exist. In the same year that the Pittsfield ghost train was reported, stories of a phantom locomotive over the fallen bridge on the River Kwai circulated in the international press. Another spectral engine is said to run in St. Louis, Saskatchewan, and in recent years the Stockholm metro system has been plagued with reports of the Silverpilen ghost car. In Eurasia, researcher Paul Stonehill has documented a number of phantom train legends throughout Russia and other eastern European countries.

Still, America retains the lion's share of these legendary paraphysical vehicles - perhaps appropriate, considering no other country ever so effectively built an empire on the backs of railroad travel. Of the phantom train accounts in my files, nearly 40 come from the United States alone, and from every region of the country.

The most famous such railroad haunting is "Lincoln's Death Train," the astral recollection of the train which carried the body of America's assassinated president. Stories of this train have circulated since just after Abe's death. It is said to be sighted at various times throughout the month of April rolling along the New York Central Railroad, with a particular affinity for April 27. On that day, so the stories go, clocks and watches all along the route are found inexplicably behind several minutes, evidence of the mysterious passage of Lincoln's Death Train. Curiously, this is also the date that a phantom train wreck is said to appear each year on the tracks near Ashville, N.C., reenacting the worst railroad disaster in the history of the state.

As for Pittsfield's ghost train, it could be a spectral reincarnation of the Boston & Albany passenger train that met with disaster in Chester in 1893, killing 14 people. That's the worst nearby train disaster I'm aware of, but if that's the case, why has it only been seen in Pittsfield, heading toward its inevitable sudden stopping point? Are people in Dalton, Hinsdale, Washington, and especially Chester, simply not paying close enough attention?

Perhaps, as I had briefly hoped last week, it will one day make another glaringly public trip through Pittsfield or the surrounding area, so someone can get a better look at it.

Ghost-Hunters of the Berkshires, Past and Present

http://advocateweekly.com/thesemysterioushills
By JOE DURWIN

After writing on the subject for The Advocate for just about two years now, it occurs to me that there are a lot of ghosts in the Berkshires. At least, there are a lot of stories about ghosts. I can't actually confirm the precise number of actual ghosts in the area, even if I could give you an exact definition of a ghost, or say honestly that I even have any kind of integrated belief system on the whole matter.

But there are all those stories - a long tradition of them, reaching back to the earliest years of local history. Accordingly, there is also a long tradition of investigation and research into this rich lore by interested local residents. This seemed like a good time to take a look at some of the individuals, past and present, who have made it their business to chronicle the area's haunted atmosphere.

The first really notable attempt to record information about the mysteries in these hills was undertaken by Willard Douglas Coxey, a circus man turned writer, who penned two tomes on the history and folklore of the area. His 1931 "Ghosts of Old Berkshire" is a classic collection of some of the most early and pervasive stories, mostly limited to tales from the colonial era and "Indian legends" - ostensibly stories of the Mahican people who once inhabited the southern and central parts of Berkshire County, filtered through generations of retelling and restructuring by early white Americans. He was working on another book on early Dutch settlers when he died in 1943.

Perhaps the most nationally famous local ghost-purveyor, Arthur Myers, passed away just this past April at the age of 88. Born in Buffalo, Myers was the author of 21 published books; he also wrote for dozens of newspapers and magazines, winning three Associated Press awards for investigative reporting. Myers worked as a reporter and feature writer for the Berkshire Eagle from 1957 to 1964 and as editor of the Berkshire Sampler from '71-77.

Myers wrote five books on ghosts and the occult, including "The Ghostly Register" (1986), "Ghostly American Places" (1990) and "A Ghost-Hunter's Guide" (1993), all of which are still in print and popular sellers. He conducted detailed investigations of The Mount in Lenox, the Ashley House in West Springfield, the cursed ghost town of Dudleytown, Conn., and dozens of other sites throughout New England and the rest of the country.

In some of his final interviews and conversations, Myers expressed a sense of optimism and curiosity about death. "I'm just anxious to see what the next dimension will be," he told one family member.

While Myers was writing about local hauntings, in North Adams Ali Allmaker was studying the problem from an academic vantage point. Born in Germany in 1921, Allmaker had a background in electrical engineering and worked at Sprague Electric Company before joining the faculty of North Adams State College in 1961. He worked in the physics department until 1968, when he transferred to the philosophy department. While there, he taught courses and workshops covering ESP, hauntings and other "supra-normal" topics, and was invited to give frequent talks on the subject throughout the region.

He also did some fairly extensive ghost-hunting of his own. Thirty years before there were TV shows about it on every network, this mild-mannered philosophy professor was investigating reports of hauntings throughout the area, and with methods more advanced than those use in many cases today.

He investigated places like the Park McCullough mansion in Bennington, Vt., and the famous Porter-Phelps house in Hadley, as well as more obscure locations in Savoy, Hancock and elsewhere. His research at different sites included a broad range of tools, such as thermometers, compasses, Geiger counters and devices to measure fluctuations in electromagnetic fields. At times, even more unorthodox equipment like security alarms, Ouija boards and joy buzzers, came into play. In one house, something appeared to communicate with him through a series of knocks, and in another, he thought he once may have seen the apparition of a woman, but admitted that it might have been his sense of heightened expectation.

"I take a very dim view of people who just go out and see ghosts time after time," Allmaker once cautioned in an interview, but concluded that ultimately too many cases he had examined could not simply be explained away: "There's just no satisfying hypothesis or theory about what these things are."

This tradition of high-tech local ghost-hunting is being carried on into the 21st century by the Berkshire Paranormal Group. Based out of the North Adams Masonic Temple, the BPG has conducted investigations throughout the area using state of the art technology: infrared thermometers, EMF detectors, wireless motion detectors, digital voice recorders and extensive video and photographic equipment. Attempting to cover all the bases, the group also approaches their research with more esoteric methods like seances and psychic communication.

The group was started by three members of the Lafayette Graylock Masonic lodge, Josh Mantello and his father Nick Mantello, along with Greg Onorato, when they became intrigued by the history of the building they were currently occupying. The former Houghton Mansion has long been believed to be haunted by several ghosts, including that of North Adams' first mayor, Albert C. Houghton. After observing an investigation of the mansion by the New England Ghost Project, based out of Dracut, Mass., they became actively interested in the subject. There are now eight members affiliated with the group.

In addition to doing investigations, the group conducts tours and sleepovers in the mansion, and an annual "Contact" convention, bringing together speakers from around the country for three days of haunted happenings. As Josh Mantello told me, "This helps educate the public about the paranormal and help them maybe understand what has puzzled them from their past or the house they live in. It also helps educate future investigators because the more people that investigate, the more chances there will be to find proof."

Haunted History Plays out at the Equinox

By JOE DURWIN
The Advocate Weekly
Thursday, September 14

The Equinox in Manchester Village, Vt., has to be near the very top of the list of finest accommodations in the region. This resort inn is steeped in history and saturated with historic atmosphere, but tradition may not be the only thing living on at the Equinox.

Indeed, if even half the stories of encounters with the mysterious put forth by employees and lodgers are true, then it seems the Equinox may have several guests who do not appear in any of the reservations books.

The history of the Equinox is that of a host of different business enterprises, numerous individual buildings and 17 major architectural changes, all coalescing over time into one disjointed narrative. The first structure to occupy this site was the Marsh Tavern, established in 1769. Unfortunately, the Tory leanings of its proprietor, William Marsh, made it among the first pieces of property seized by revolutionaries in the war against Britain, who used it to plot insurgent schemes. By the end of the century, the Marsh Tavern had fallen into disuse, and in 1801 Thaddeus Munson had an inn erected next to it. Munson's Tavern eventually became known as Vanderlip's Hotel, then later The Taconic.

Meanwhile, Franklin Whitin Orvis, son of successful Manchester merchant Levi Orvis, consolidated the family mansion with his father's store to create a 65-room structure that opened in 1853 as the Equinox House. He offered 60 additional rooms in the Equinox Junior (then called "the Annex") across the street. In 1880, Franklin purchased the Taconic and eventually came to add the Charles Orvis Inn, the home built in 1861 by his brother, founder of the Orvis Company.

The Equinox's tenure as a premiere getaway resort for the wealthy and powerful began in the mid 1860s, when Mary Todd Lincoln summered there with sons Robert and Tad. Abraham was to join them in the summer of 1865, and special renovations were done in preparation for his visit, but John Wilkes Booth had a different travel package in mind for him. Robert returned to Manchester often in the following years, building his Hildene estate in Manchester and attracting ever larger groups of his wealthy friends from New York and Chicago. The Equinox continued to shine as a bucolic retreat for society's upper crust, providing lodging for four presidents until the time of the Depression, after which it limped along for many years, changing owners numerous times.

The point at which the Equinox began to acquire its reputation for being haunted is less easy to place, though the real deluge of unusual reports seems to have begun with the hotel's resurrection. From 1973 until 1985, the hotel remained closed for business, but underwent massive renovation by its then owner Francesco Galesi. Since then, employees and guests have reported a consistent stream of mysterious happenings.

My friend Joe Citro collected an impressive catalog of witness accounts in his book "Green Mountain, Dark Tales" (2001). Indeed, he found that unlike many haunted hotels, bizarre phenomena are not confined to one or two rooms; virtually every part of the sprawling 183 room resort has generated stories of inexplicable experiences. Guests and staff alike report hearing voices and footsteps in empty rooms, sudden temperature changes, and objects vanishing or moving unaccountably. Security guards will find doors to vacant rooms open, and inside find shades disturbed, rocking chairs rocking and other signs of recent activity.

Objects will often vanish and reappear elsewhere in the Equinox. In one second floor room, missing furniture and other items were discovered piled up like a pyramid. One hotel guest complained to the concierge that he'd stepped out of his room for a moment, returning only to find that the keys he'd left on the table had been separated from the ring and thrown around the room.

The most absorbing account came from Robert Cullinan, a security guard at the Equinox since its opening. One night in the '90s, he was called up to investigate a "disturbance" in room 329; when he arrived, he found a family of four in near-hysterics, and had little difficulty discerning why. The rocking chairs were rocking rhythmically, while the shades on the lamps spun slowly around of their own accord. Most upsettingly, the bed appeared to be lurching, one leg at a time, across the floor. Just then, Cullinan felt something invisible push him - so hard that he nearly went down, all 220 pounds of him.

The family was graciously provided with another room, but six other employees attested to witnessing the unusual events in room 329 that night.

For their part, Rock Resorts, the current owners of The Equinox, doesn't seem particularly anxious to play down the hotel's legendary reputation, and has even incorporated it into a special package with their other reputedly haunted hotel, La Posada de Santa Fe in Santa Fe, N.M. Stay at one between Oct. 29 and Nov. 16, and you get a discount on the other. Cute, eh?

Meanwhile, if the place is haunted, who by? The most prevalent theory, and the one most favored by the hotel's PR staff, I'd imagine, is that the spectral remnants of Mary and Tad Lincoln have made themselves a permanent part of the landscape they enjoyed so much. At least one person has claimed to have heard the sounds of a mother comforting a whining child, and Tad was a brat, from what I've read. Then again, that's pretty universal, and it seems a little too convenient that the particular mother and child that elected to haunt the place happen to be such a great tie-in with the very history that made the Equinox famous in the first place.

Another possibility arises from the fact that part of the Equinox Junior also functioned as a jailhouse for some time. It's been rumored that in the process of renovation, some bones were discovered. Fearing another delay in an already obstacle-ridden process, it was disposed of and went unreported.

Some wonder if this may be the root cause of some of the misfortunes which befell the place, including a propane explosion in 1985 which badly burned a large portion of the hotel.

Maybe it's a lot simpler than all that, though, when you really stop and think about the setting. It's seems likely it's really just out of state ghosts with expensive tastes.


Joe Durwin is a local mystery buff who would like the Equinox management to know that he would gladly arrange a full scale state-of-the-art investigation of their bizarre phenomena in exchange for a complimentary two-night stay. Send reports of local weirdness to joe@durwin.net

Can New Owners Silence the Screams at Adams' Haunted Hospital?

Advocate Weekly- These Mysterious Hills

By JOE DURWIN

The former W.B. Plunkett Memorial Hospital in Adams has not been a hospital since before I was born, and until recently, hadn't been anything else, either - which put it in an interesting position, for an empty, abandoned hospital is a magical thing indeed.

A building like Plunkett, left dark and boarded up and bereft of human activity, is practically begging to become overgrown in shadowy tangles of rumor and lore.

By the time I first heard about it in the early '90s, the "old asylum in Adams" was a source of mystery to many Pittsfield teenagers, and a frequent site of the youthful practice known to academic contemporary folklorists as legend-tripping, and to everyone else in straight society as trespassing. A spate of publicized arrests in 2003, followed closely by the development of the property into condominiums by Scarafoni Associates, ultimately ended this practice, and lead to even more frequent disclaimers and warnings about private property on popular ghost-hunting Web sites.

But for many years before that, the intrepid told tales of ghastly sights and sounds, of echoing screams and apparitions of patients who had died horribly there. The first person who ever showed me the foreboding hilltop building on Edmund Street told me quite matter-of-factly that one part of the place was haunted by a legless ghost that could be heard groaning and crawling along the floor.

In more recent years, someone claimed on an Internet message board to have a photo of a spectral woman taken inside the hospital. When I tracked him down, he declined to let me have a copy, citing the potential legal implications of his having it.

W.B. Plunkett died before the hospital he had built first opened in 1918, and it was subsequently completed by his brother C.T. Plunkett. It was a thriving institution for several decades, though perhaps disappointingly for some, never an asylum for the insane - at least, no more so than your average hospital. The hospital fell into decline in the late '60s and early '70s. Amidst and among other problems, in 1970 its administrator and his wife, the head of nursing, became embroiled in scandal when he was convicted of possessing thousands of pornographic photos and "letters pertaining to wife-swapping practices" and was asked to resign. The hospital limped along for a couple of years before its license was suspended in June of 1973.

For most of the time since, its been informally labeled haunted. But then, that doesn't come as much of a surprise; you can't swing a dead psychic black cat without hitting an abandoned/haunted hospital or asylum in New England. Most of them even basically look alike. Meanwhile, a quick Google search for haunted hospital yielded a couple million results.

And why not? Sure, people live in their houses, but they do an awful lot of their dying in hospitals. Some of them quite horribly - a cursory search of local papers turned up dozens of obituaries of people of all ages dying painfully after fires, accidents, etc., including, interestingly enough, one North Adams man who perished of shock at Plunkett after a train crushed his legs. Perhaps some of all that has to seep into a place, linger in its pores a while.

Now that it's no longer a boarded-up bastion of shadows and busted piping, but an elaborate development with 13 occupied units, is it still haunted? As Dave Carter of Scarafoni Associates informed me with admirable simplicity, "We have not had any reports of ghosts at Plunkett Hill Condominiums."

Time will tell.


----

Joe Durwin is a mystery mongerer who would like to see things done with a lot more of the great old creepy buildings sitting empty in the area. Send weird stories, ghost photos, cursed artifacts, or pernicious rumors to joe@durwin.net, or write him care of The Advocate.

The Missing 'Monument to Sacrifice'

http://www.advocateweekly.com/thesemysterioushills

A tiny graveyard on the western slope of Lebanon Mountain, tucked away just off Route 20 in Bates Memorial State Park, remains as a very obscure local reminder of the legacy of the Bates family for whom the park is named, and a physical window into the curious story of the mammoth obelisk that very nearly got built there. It contains only a few simple headstones, clustered around a six foot tall granite cross marking the grave of Lindon W. Bates Jr. The cross bears the inscription Le vrai caractere perce toujours dans le grandes circonstances, true character always shows through in great circumstances.

Most of the standard local histories that I own or have perused have little of significance to say about the Bates family history. One of my staple reference tomes, Clay Perrys New Englands Buried Treasure (1946), spares a tiny passage describing the Bates family ghost house, near which the family began constructing a monument to their perished son, and from which, it is said, they rose suddenly from the dinner table one night and fled the place forever, leaving their belongings and never offering an explanation. To someone of my peculiar bent, such an off-hand morsel seems designed to tantalize the reader into a state of absolutely insufferable curiosity. Was there any relationship between this story and the old legend of a devil exorcised years earlier by the nearby Shakers, I wondered? What I found upon closer examination was better than another local haunted house yarn- in the true roots of that tiny plot is a storybook saga that stands as emblematic of an entire chapter in American history.

The Bates family first purchased 800 acres of land from the Shakers, building a summer villa named Lebanon Lodge between the Hancock and New Lebanon Shaker communities. Times had been good for Lindon Bates Sr.; Bates Engineering and Construction Company was a profit-generating giant even before they were contracted for the Panama Canal. He, along with his wife Josephine and his sons, Lindon Jr. and Lindell, were deep in the heart of New York high society, and like many of their peers at the time, decided on the Berkshires for the location of a part time estate. Unlike many of the monumentally wealthy families who took up residence in the area in the Gilded Age, though, they seem to have actually been happy, morally decent people, with no apparent skeletons in their closet.

Lindon Jr. in particular seems to have lead an almost storybook life of exemplary kindness, courage and generosity, the kind of tale that would be too cheesy to believe in fiction, or perhaps at all, if it werent so well documented. He had been instilled at an early age with a real concept of noblesse oblige, the sense of ones wealth being a matter of providence, and the belief that the individual lucky enough to acquire wealth has a grave duty to those less fortunate, and must act honorably and generously at all times. Until recently, I had thought the rumored existence of such an inclination among members of the extremely wealthy class could safely be relegated to the domain of fairy tale and propaganda. Perhaps this conclusion was premature.

Lindons future seemed bright from a young age. After graduating Harrow School in England, he took up studies at Yale at the age of 12, graduating top of his class in 1902 with a degree in Civil Engineering, accolades in sports, sciences, and fluency in a plethora of languages. He explored and traveled extensively, covering the Nile, the Amazon, Siberia and Mongolia among other exotic locales, meanwhile writing four books and numerous articles. Nonetheless, more than once he stated that some of his happiest times took place at Lebanon Lodge, hiking and admiring the extraordinary views of the Housatonic valley from atop Richmond Peak.

He became involved in politics early, rising up in Republican party while campaigning for Teddy Roosevelt. He served two terms in the New York legislature, where he pushed and steadily forged support for a rigorous progressive platform, getting legislation passed for Workmans Compensation, civil service merit systems, and various kinds of aid for widows and the unemployed.

One of his political associates wrote of him, One of his most striking characteristics was his indifference to opinion. He wanted the right thing done and did not care whether he or someone else did it. By twenty-five, some were already looking to him as a possible future President.

When War erupted in Europe in 1914, Lindon dedicated himself to organizing a massive relief effort, marshalling millions of dollars in food and financial aid to Belgium. The King of Belgium eventually awarded him with the Belgian cross for his philanthropic labors on behalf of their nation. In the spring of 1915, Lindon was also desperately needed to supervise the raising of the Galveston flood plain, a massive undertaking. Hence, when the Belgian government asked him to come manage food distribution throughout their country, Lindon Bates Sr. pleaded with him to put off the trip. The Belgian Embassy also continued to plead, and with hardly any time spent pondering, he left New York on the S.S. Lusitania on May 2.

Six days later, the world was stunned by the headlines: the Lusitania had been torpedoed by a German U-Boat in the North Sea. An unexpected second explosion (said by some to have been caused by munitions that were secretly carried onboard) occurred immediately, and the ship sank within twenty minutes time. Twelve hundred civilians were killed.

Lindons body was not immediately accounted for, but his last moments had already been pieced together by the testimony of survivors. When the torpedo struck, he was on deck conversing with another passenger, Amy Pearl. He left her with her husband and set out into the melee to locate her children. Another witness reported seeing him take off his life preserver and put it on a hysterical elderly woman, getting her on one of the last boats launched. He was last seen heading back below deck. His body washed up 230 miles from the wreck two and a half months later.

An enormous funeral took place in New York, with condolences from Roosevelt, and eulogies by Ogden Mills, future first lady Lou Henry Hoover, and many others. One such eulogy reads: Thus it stands forever. The bravest are the tenderest; the loving are the daring. Lindon Wallace Bates. Son of America. Friend of the helpless and destitute. The life that he lived and the death that he died endure in the judgment of an unforgetting God. Later, privately, his younger brother Lindell brought his remains home, interring them in a temporary crypt carved out of the bedrock near his beloved Lebanon Lodge.

His parents commissioned architect Donne Barber to design an enormous monument, to Lindon Jr. and to all the Lusitania victims, to be built on their property. The structure he designed, drawings of which still exist, was to be a 130 foot tall granite obelisk replicating Pompeiis Pillar in Alexandria. It was to be spot lit on three sides, and the lights would remain on forever.

The loss of their eldest son had hit the Bates family hard, though. Josephine remained depressed the rest of her life. Lindon Sr. dumped abnormally high amounts of the family fortune into research on ship camouflage. Then the United States entered the Great War, and the noble ideals of an entire generation were slaughtered, their bright hopes for a better world dying off in the gunfire and mustard gas. The Bates family never really recovered, and plans for the massive Monument did not survive the times- nor, some would say, did any real sense of noblesse oblige in this country.

Lindell fenced off the tiny plot where Lindons humble cross now stands. Lindon Sr. was buried there in 1924, Josephine in 1934, Lindell in 1937. In 1954, Lindon Sr.s sister Mary Wallace Bates, whose life story is an interesting tale in its own right, became the last person interred there. Lindell bequeathed the remaining acres to Pittsfield upon his death, about half of which remain as public park land today. Aside from these few small graves, no trace of Lebanon Lodge, its supposed ghost house, or the envisioned Monument to Sacrifice remains only a half-remembered fairy tale about a distant time, when a very few individuals believed that they had both the means and the will to transform the world into a better place.

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Joe Durwin is a Pittsfield native currently on sabbatical in the desert. Send oddball rumors, crackpot theories, bizarre gossip, and accounts of the strange to joe@durwin.net or write to him care of the Advocate.

Phone Calls From Korendor

Joe Durwin
June 8, 2006
Advocate Weekly

“In the wee hours of the morning, when the first golden rays of the sun were probing the black veil of a cold December night for an opening through which to illuminate the world, I held my ninth radio communication with people from another planet.”

Be alerted, reader: this is not the opening line from a science fiction novel, though it would probably play well in that context. Instead, these were the words with which a Berkshires man named Bob began his account of his years of personal contact with the Korendians. It all began in July, 1961, when the then eighteen year old radio buff was browsing around the short-wave bands with his equipment, “searching for something interesting to listen t,” finally selecting a BBC station. It was not long before an irritating noise disturbed his listening, and as he attempted to identify its cause, a clear, feminine voice spoke out from his headphones “Bob, we’d like you to stay on this frequency for a while.”

The voice proceeded to introduce herself as Lin-Erri, a native of the Planet Korendor, currently speaking to him from a spacecraft several miles from Earth.

By his own account, Bob was understandably dumbfounded. He notes that he had read a couple of books and some newspaper articles on the subject of flying saucers (as had quite a substantial part of the American population by 1961), but described himself as “still somewhat skeptical of such things.” Prior to that, in a 1958 letter to the editor that appeared in the Berkshire Evening Eagle, this same young man had stated that based on his reading (which included notorious extraterrestrial contactee claimant George Adamski’s book Flying Saucers Have Landed) he was “inclined to inclined to accept for fact the existence of the extraterrestrial beings and their spacecraft.” Still, there believes in aliens, and then there’s having aliens chat you up one evening.

Lin-Erri told Bob that they had become interested in the mountains of the Berkshires, specifically in a certain unnamed material to be found there that was useful to some of their electronic devices. Lin-Erri and her companions became interested in speaking to Bob because of his interest in UFOs, as well as in “world peace and the future of mankind.” She gave him instructions on how to upgrade his equipment in order to have two-way communication with him, and from that time on Bob spoke with Lin-Erri and other Korendians frequently. Their home planet, they said, was very similar to earth, but with a higher percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere. Korendor was the third planet in the 12 planet system orbiting the star Korena, which lay about three degrees from Arcturus in the constellation Bootes, not visible from Earth with our current telescopic technology. In appearance, the Korendians were not unlike us; though typically shorter in stature, they appear similar enough to travel and work among us without notice.

Bob described his continued contacts with the Korendians in articles that were published in UFO International between 1963 and 1969. These accounts, along with some supplemental information, were later gathered into a privately printed book entitled UFO Contact From Korendor, e-book versions of which are currently still available on the internet. He describes finally meeting with representatives of the Korendian race, including Lin-Erri and others, traveling in their spacecraft and visiting their underground base in the Berkshires. His accounts included detailed descriptions of their technology, diagrams of their vehicles, and even photographs of alleged flying saucers, of which I was only able to obtain some murky Xerox’s. The majority of the material he presented consisted of transcriptions of conversations, primarily messages and social diatribes from his Korendian contacts. At times his story reads like a “100 ways Korendor is better than Earth” list. The Korendians seem to have had a very progressive platform, even for the sixties: besides denunciation of war, atomic weapons, and racial inequality, they preached a possible salvation for humanity intertwining both greater technology and greater morality, a more conscious existence free of “dangerous emotionalism.” They predicted that Communism in its current tyrannous incarnation would collapse under its own weight and that the west should try to coexist peaceably with it in the meantime. Korendians were even said to have been behind the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965, in order to prompt the U.S. to modify and upgrade its grid system.

There’s more to Bob’s story, hundreds of pages of testimony recounting his encounters with the Korendians. Later, at least two other individuals, John W. Dean and Cameron Colin Boyd, also reported contacts with the kindly folk from Korendor; Dean’s are described in his book Flying Saucers Close-up, along with what he maintains are examples of Korendian writing and vocabulary. Bob maintains to this day that he is the only Korendian contact, and that others who have made such claims are either frauds or victims of deception by forces aligned against the Korendian cause.

As to the veracity and potential significance of Bob’s own reports, different people have come to different conclusions. Gabriel Green, editor of UFO International, embraced and published his accounts, couching them with enthusiastic editorial notes. They were also championed by retired Air Force pilot turned UFO investigator Wendelle Stevens, who had them published in book form. Whitley Strieber notes that the name Lin-Erri phonetically translates into the Gaelic “body of light,” drawing parallels between the Korendians and ancient lore of the Sidhe or Faerie beings, right down to their underground realms. UFO theorist John Keel suggests that they, along other UFO beings, fairies, and so forth down through the ages are all “ultraterrestrials”, beings of sort of semi-material, daemonic dimensional reality bordering ours.

Generally speaking, though, even among the admittedly fringe pursuit of ufology, this type of “contactee” narrative, most famously associated with George Adamski, is treated with little credibility, and rarely seriously discussed in UFO circles today. One skeptic, though, ufologist Allan Grise, came to the Berkshires to visit Bob at his home, and was intrigued by what he found. A professional engineer and ham-radio buff, Grise looked at Bob’s equipment and found that “everything seemed to make sense. The circuits were all appropriate to extend the receiving range.” He also listened to some tapes purported to be of conversations with Lin-Erri, whose voice he describes as having “a singsong, melodious quality,” and whose halting speech patterns suggested someone foreign managing well in English.

Bob stayed out of the contactee scene of conventions and lecture circuits, confining his public face to his written accounts. Grise found him to be uninterested in self-promotion, volunteering little but amenable to questions. Over email exchange I found it to be similar; he was resistant to the idea of any press coverage, but was kind enough to clarify some points for me. He’s not loopy- schizophrenic, megalomaniacal, anything like that - and I’ve dealt with “UFO nuts,” believe me. As for the UFO base in the Berkshires (vague rumor of which initially lead me to Bob’s story) various internet sites identify Mt. Everett as being the site of an underground alien base, but Bob tells me he knows nothing about that. As to where exactly the base he described in his claims is located, and whether or not he still has involvement with the Korendians, Bob only jokes “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

If his story IS a fabrication, he deserves to take his rightful place alongside Orson Welles, L. Ron Hubbard, Lovecraft and other great science fiction crossover artists. I, like most people, might have a hard time endorsing the idea of such a vast extraterrestrial presence going so secretly among us. It’s not such a bad scenario, though, should it someday turn out that Bob was right all along; these Korendians seem like nice enough blokes, provided they don’t end up being rodent-eating reptiles underneath, with books on How to Serve Man.

Ubiquitous Ghosts of Southern Vermont College

Thursday, May 25
BENNINGTON, Vt. - Southern Vermont College is perhaps the most populously haunted spot in southern Vermont.

If even half the accounts that have trickled out of that place are true, at times it almost seems that spectral wanderers on the Bennington campus must be just about tripping over one another, playing out their ancient, eerie pursuits in the aetherial background behind the bustling campus of the living.

The college is housed on what was originally the estate of Edward Hamlin Everett, who purchased 500 acres from the John Holden estate in 1910. Everett lived in Bennington for most of his youth, leaving in 1869 to pursue wealth farther west. He was not disappointed. He gradually purchased up all of the American Bottle Co. - and in the process of trying to cut costs on the glass fires, prospected and became the first person to strike oil in Ohio. In '86 he married Amy King, the daughter of a Newark aristocrat whose glassworks factory Everett had just acquired.

Along with homes in Newark and Washington (not to forget the chateau in Vevy, Switzerland - times were good for Edward), he built himself a marvelous summer mansion in Bennington.

Legend has it that, not long after, Amy drowned there while swimming, quite unexpectedly - some say freak accident, some suicide, some murder. According to her obituary, however, Amy King Everett died at their Washington home, in March of 1917. She had suffered from a prolonged, unnamed illness and died following a "severe operation."

In 1920, Edward remarried, this time to Grace Burnap, originally from Hopkinton, Mass. Tradition has it that the three daughters he had with Amy never cared for their father's second wife. Two of them had already married and moved before their mother's death, the third not long after - and it's believed they resented the way Everett went on to sire two more children with this new, much younger wife. When Edward died in 1929, the stage was set for a venomous and quite public legal battle.

When the will was unveiled, it bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to Grace, leaving only about one tenth of the family's enormous wealth to his three daughters from his first marriage. The daughters sued, arguing that their father had not been in his right mind when the will was signed and that his second wife, who after all was not much older than the oldest of them, had exercised undue influence on him.

What became dubbed "The Battle of Bennington Millions," or "The Second Battle of Bennington," began. It was the largest and most talked about court case in the state, launching to fame the lawyer Warren Austin, who went on to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (and they didn't give that job to just any old nut with a moustache, back then). Witnesses included Sen. Arthur Capper of Kansas and Laura Harlan, daughter of former Chief Justice John Harlan. Grace Everett herself was subjected to three continuous days of relentless grilling on the witness stand. As Joseph Citro, Vermont's most esteemed gothic author, put it, the proceedings "left the magnificent Glass and Bottle Baron of the American Industrial Revolution looking like a pitiable weakling, utterly dominated by his Lady Macbeth of a wife." The court sided with Everett's first daughters, awarding them each about a third of the fortune, with the remaining amount going to Grace and her two daughters.

Some say that great dramas and great sorrows of this sort leave a mark behind in certain places - perhaps a kind of shadow radiating in the poorly understood fabric of the physical universe, a wisp of smoke: In short, they are haunted.

Since the college first took up residence on the Everett estate in the mid 1970s, a steady stream of unexplained disturbances and mysterious figures have been sighted. Security guards whisper about doorknobs turning in empty rooms and doors that close by themselves. According to a college administrator, on one occasion in 1982, a security guard called him when he could not identify the source of some strange noises. When they finally tracked the sounds to an office on the third floor, they found that the door, which was locked from the outside and had no other entrance, had somehow been blocked from the inside by a heavy desk. In what was once the old carriage house, there've been numerous reports of doors and windows locking and unlocking by themselves and computers that snap on and off suddenly.

One of the most frequently reported phenomena is the appearance of a woman in white, roaming the main house and grounds, thought by some to be the ghost of Edward's first wife.

There might be other candidates for ghostly representation wandering the environs. In 1956, Bennington witnessed the mysterious double suicide of the Lundoffs, a reclusive older couple living right beside the former Everett estate. Clemons W. Lundoff, and his wife, Hilda, were found sitting in their parked car in the garage, having died of carbon monoxide poisoning only shortly before. Although they'd lived there for a number of years, the Lundoffs had kept to themselves and had no known friends in the area, nor relatives. The city sold their property at auction, and the motive for their suicide pact remained a mystery. However, in 1922, I discovered, he was indicted, along with six others, for war fraud, including some 500 Army contracts. This mark may go some way toward explaining the couple's reclusively - and perhaps their violent end.

There are also rumors of shadowy figures in dark hooded robes lurking around the edges of the campus at night, and students sometimes speak matter-of-factly about the Black Hooded Monk. This has become associated with the fact that before SVC, the estate was the site of St. Joseph's School, a Catholic seminary. But it reminds me of various rumors I've heard of people in hooded black robes in other locations around Bennington County.

Writer Hal Crowther gave an account of a bizarre incident he witnessed 1962, while he was attending Williams College. While in Bennington one night, he and his roommate were approached by some girls who invited them to a spot where they were blindfolded and led into a wooded area. When the blindfolds were taken off, they found themselves near a pond abutting a stone wall, surrounded by dark robed women.

As Crowther described it, "There was some chanting, not in any language I knew - and I had studied Latin. Then one woman got up on the wall, took off her robe and dived into the pond. As if it was very deep. And here's the strangest part: She didn't come up." Crowther later saw the girl alive in Bennington and was never sure what to make of the experience. Some Bennington College girls having a prank at the expense of some buttoned-down Williams boys, perhaps? Such a thing wouldn't exactly have been an historical anomaly. Nonetheless, there are a couple of local informants who've insisted to me that some sort of CULT did or does exist in the Green Mountains, conducting strange rituals in the night. My Wiccan friends don't seem to know anything about it, but who knows?

All in all, the estate is ensconced in history and mystery, a great combination for a full-flavored college experience or a gripping horror novel. Appropriately, some that believes that the Everett Mansion, along with a few other locations around the area, served to inspire Shirley Jackson's nightmarish Hill House, but that is a whole other story, for another week.

Washington Stone Formations

All photos courtesy of Norman Muller & Peter Waksman

In a lightly wooded area in Washington, Massachusetts, there lies a curious pile of stones. New England, of course, is full of piled stones- the results of centuries of efforts to clear fields from a seemingly endless quantity of unwanted rock. Rocks piled for walls, boundary markers, burial markers, or just to get them out of the way.

New England is also rife with other kinds of rock formations as well, tucked away in remote forested areas, and requiring considerable effort to construct for no apparent practical reason. The cairn in question, along with several related structures nearby, fall into this latter category, and form part of an enigma that has attracted much speculation over the years. In a reasonably open spot on a piece of property on an old country road stands a 7 foot tall cairn of carefully piled stones that has been referred to by some as the Washington Mystery Monument (not to be confused with Monument Mountain ‘mystery’ cairn so thoroughly covered by Lion G. Miles in a recent Advocate article). This formation, along with several other similar stone structures in secluded spots in Washington, constitutes an interesting bit of unsolved local history. It has become customary to withhold from print the exact locations of these sites, both out of respect and to prevent vandalism, and I shall continue this trend here.

Despite the lack of disclosure and general obscurity of these Washington structures beyond local circles, a few determined investigators have examined them, and pondered their origins and meanings. The primary stone formation is comprised of a conical pile seven feet in height, and about seven feet wide at the base. The stones, some weighing hundreds of pounds, are stacked neatly and carefully, with no trace of mortar or clay packing. The tower tapers off at the top to a width of about three feet, and on top, single quartz stone has been placed in the center. At the base of the structure, a small chamber opens facing north. The chamber is about two feet high and a foot deep; in 1969, a reporter for the Springfield Republican pointed out its resemblance to a hearth, but lacking chimney.



A short distance from this obelisk there are two concentric stone circles, deeply implanted in the ground and largely grown over with moss. The outer circle is about 4 feet in diameter, the inner circle 3, inside of which is a large quartz rock. These structures are clearly related to each other, and, I would venture, to other structures not far away. Along a nearby ridge can be found several platform cairns, several of which are built atop boulders. One of these also boasts a small chamber like opening at its base.


Not far from the road, on another secluded piece of property, there is yet another chamber, wider and deeper than the others, this one built directly into a hillside. Centered just above the opening is a rock that stands out from the others, a single piece of hematite.

For many years now, interested parties have been trying to establish the origins of Washington’s crystal-topped, hearth-like cairn and its cousin sites. It is not mentioned in the earliest Berkshire sources, and it is nowhere near where any property lines have run in historically recorded times. A woman born around 1900 on the property where the main cairn stands is reported to have said that the structure had already been there for some time when her father first settled the land, in the 1880s or 90s. The “Stockbridge” Indians are known to have had a summer encampment in that area until the late 1750s, but nothing about any such structures was recounted to those colonial settlers who interfaced with these Berkshire natives.


Even without a clear historical picture of their construction, many interesting observations can be made between this apparently interrelated network of structures, as well as their similarities to other megalithic constructions around New England. The chamber space built into the cairn is a fairly unusual feature, but not unheard of. In Ashfield, Massachusetts, there are several conical stone piles with cavities similarly built into the base. Like the one in Washington, the Ashfield chambers also face due north. At a major site in New York, three out of several hundred cairns were found to have such openings as well. Test digging dug at the base of the opening revealed a six inch layer of charcoal a foot and half below ground. This suggests something burning for extended periods, hinting at the possibility that these spaces may have served for making ritual offerings. The presence of hematite at the hillside chamber is also quite interesting. Hematite was frequently used in making the red ochre so often associated with burial and ritual traditions.

Some have seen in these structures a similarity to altars used for burning offerings by ancient Israelites, stone cairns with fires lit on top. Many American stone piles do seem to bear a resemblance to ones found in Arabia, some in close proximity to stone circles. Others have pointed to them as evidence for early American exploration by Irish, Norse, and other European groups, drawing connections to analogous formations in many ancient cultural groups. It may be an indication that vastly divorced peoples in similar stages of development come to similar conclusions about spirituality. But why these particular patterns of construction? What fundamental concepts do they embody?

I will say that judging from their condition, most of these megaliths seem to be less ancient than the stone tunnels in nearby Goshen, probably built by a more recent culture. They are, however, no less mysterious. They are indelible fountains of possibilities, Rorschach tests etched permanently into the landscapes for future generations.


Sources:

The Search for Lost America: Mysteries of the Stone Ruins in the United States
By Salvatore Michael Trento

“Monument poses mystery in the Berkshires.” Wadsworth R. Pierce, The Springfield Union, July 17 1969

“New information on an interesting Berkshires site.” NEARA Newsletter v.5 , March 1970

Rock Piles:
http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2006_04_02_rockpiles_archive.html

The Mount's Literary Phantasmagoria

Advocate Weekly
Thursday, April 20

"Sources," Edith Wharton once wrote, ".are not one what one needs in judging a ghost story. The good ones bring their own internal proof of their own ghostliness; and no other evidence is needed."

A troublesome remark for me, certainly, as a significant amount of my time is spent seeking out the sources of ghost stories, and judging them thereby. In her own case, however, her observation proves apt enough: the stories of paranormal events coming out of her Lenox home the last few decades do have a sort of inarguable internal logic.

The Mount was built between 1900 and 1902, on a 130 acre tract of Lenox land Wharton purchased for just over $40,000. She based the mansion in large part on Belton House, in Lincolnshire, England, designed by Sir Christopher Wren. The architecture was handled by the firm Hoppin & Koen (not, as is frequently stated, her friend and literary collaborator Ogden Codman, whom she replaced after initial planning for being too expensive), but the lion's share of the credit goes to Wharton herself, whose instructions the architects merely followed to the letter. The house she outlined reflected the sensibilities she had put forth in her own book on the subject, "The Decoration of Houses." She could be said to be an advocate of minimalism - at least by the "never-say-when" standards of the Gilded Age - nonetheless, the expense of the project was extreme. Despite Wharton's substantial wealth, the final touches had to wait until 1905 brought a much needed injection of cash, in the form of "House of Mirth" royalties.

Wharton called The Mount her "first real home," and considered it an ideal environment for writing, which she worked on each morning sitting up in bed, saying that she preferred to keep the practice of her craft from interfering with her other obligations. In the decade that she kept residence at her sprawling estate along Laurel Lake, Wharton completed some of her finest work. In particular, a fair majority of the events and characters in "Ethan Frome," including Frome himself, were directly drawn from local inspiration. While living there with her husband, Edward (Teddy) Wharton - a wealthy socialite born into the same circles as Edith (maiden name Jones, the family referred to in the once popular catch-phrase "keeping up with the Joneses") - she frequently entertained as guests many luminaries of the literary and intellectual world, including Richard Watson Gilder, Howard Sturgis, Clyde Fitch and Henry James.

Wharton sold the property in 1912, as her marriage to Teddy (described by some contemporaries as "charming but dim"), was dissolving. She never returned. It was remarked that in the end Wharton found Paris to be her true "spiritual home." While this may be true, it was The Mount, above and beyond any other location, which in later years would come to be thought of as her spectral home. The property has changed hands half a dozen times since then, but Wharton's presence, both historical and otherwise, has left a palpable and seemingly unshakable mark on the estate.



The Mount came for a time under the ownership of Carr van Anda, managing editor of the New York Times, who in 1943 sold it to Foxhollow School, which had purchased the former Vanderbilt estate adjacent to it a few years earlier. For about 30 years, The Mount served as a dormitory for the girls' preparatory school, and it is during this period that the first rumors of a ghostly presence began circulating. "There were lots of stories," said one former student. " Of course, girls' boarding schools will be girls boarding schools."

Dorothy Carpenter, another alumna of Foxhollow, reported the following: "People use to talk about it all the time.... Every time we'd hear a creak, we'd say it was Edith Wharton's ghost, but nobody really thought it was." Carpenter's perspective on the stories changed, however, when she returned to the house in the early '70s. The house had fallen into disuse by then, and Carpenter spent two months living there alone while she worked on restoration of the ballroom ceiling. One day, she was staring off absently out the window, when she saw a woman in period clothing walking across the terrace. She recognized her instantly from pictures she'd seen, but the version she was looking at now seemed far more vivid, more "alive" than any representation. "At the time, I thought maybe I'd been inhaling too much plaster dust."

As most locals know, in the late '70s The Mount was acquired by the legendary theatre troupe Shakespeare & Company, who occupied the site for more than 20 years. During this period, apparitions and spectral tableaus were reportedly witnessed by some of the brightest luminaries of the regional theater world. Dennis Krausnick, a former Jesuit priest turned actor and director, was one of the first people to enter the building. He reported that while he was working alone in the house, he heard footsteps constantly, but could find no one in the house upon searching. Josephine Abady, former head of the Hampshire College theater department and artistic director for Berkshire Theater Festival, described to one writer how she saw an apparition of Wharton several times while on the premises, and was haunted constantly by a rustling sound not unlike the swishing of a someone in a long dress walking by. On at least one occasion, she saw the Wharton figure in the company of a man who looked very much like Henry James, not knowing at the time that James had been a favorite house guest there.

This same male ghost was reported by none other than Shakespeare & Company founder Tina Packer, perhaps tellingly in the "Henry James Bedroom." Another actress, Andrea Haring, described a supernatural scene of both the Whartons, as well as James, all apparently engaged in conversation. The sheer appropriateness of the idea of The Mount being haunted by both Wharton and James cannot be overstated. Among her other literary accomplishments, Wharton is generally held in high regard as one of the finest American purveyors of the ghost story, who cared passionately about the subject and brought many novel touches to the genre. As for Henry James, well, I won't gush, but "Turn of the Screw" is quite simply, in my opinion, among only two or three other pieces of writing committed to paper contending for the title of greatest horror story ever.

With such a foundation - combined with the building's reincarnations as first a prep school, then theatrical mecca, both highly charged, creative environments - perhaps ghostly sightings were inevitable. Maybe Wharton really was right about ghost stories, after all.


"Sources":

Berkshire Evening Eagle, May 20, 1943

Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise May 30, 2002

Myers, Arthur. The Ghostly Register (Contemporary, 1986)

Ogden, Tom. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Ghosts & Hauntings (Alpha Books, 2004)

Owens, Carole. The Berkshire Cottages: A Vanishing Era (Cottage Press, 1994)


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Joe Durwin is a freelance writer and one possible answer to the question "Who ya gonna call?" Send comments or reports of the strange to joe@durwin.net.

MCLA course project has students researching unexplained phenomena

By Jennifer Huberdeau, North Adams Transcript
April 14, 2006


MCLA junior George Inman delved into the subculture phenomenon of vampirism — both the psychic- and blood-feeding kind. Photo by Paul Guillotte/North Adams Transcript



NORTH ADAMS — Floating lanterns, wandering lights, strange winds and eerie voices calling from within the Hoosac Tunnel are staple legends surrounding the infamous portal. The validity of claims about the haunting of the tunnel was one of many subjects explored in a "Skeptic Fair" at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
"I'm still 50/50 on my findings. It think part of it is fabricated because of the history of the tunnel. There are things I can't explain, but I believe a large part of it is psychological. You get an eerie feeling at the tunnel, but it is dark, damp and cold inside the tunnel," said Julia Kowalski, a senior from South Bridge.

Students in psychology professor Thomas Byrne's class, the "Psychology of Superstition and the Unexplained," presented their findings on topics ranging from alien abductions and crop circles to the practices of Reiki and chiropracty.

"The basic idea was for my students to examine why or why not people believe these things and to examine their own belief systems. They were given a lot of leeway to choose their topic, I only asked they go into the project with an open mind — without preconceived opinions," Byrnes said. "They were asked to investigate their topic, find evidence and decide if the claims were true or false."

Kowalski said her initial idea was to investigate the infamous crop circles, but on a suggestion of a friend, decided to look at the Hoosac Tunnel because of her ability to gain "hands-on" evidence.

"I actually brought a tape recorder into the tunnel. I went into the tunnel about 2,500 feet," she said. Kowalski was trying to recreate a similar experiment done by college students during the early 1980s. That experiment captured what some people would call electronic voice phenomena or "muffled voices."

"I didn't have any muffled voices, just those of my friends and myself. I think one explanation for the muffled voices could be contributed to echoes in the tunnel," Kowalski said. She said other things like wandering lights could possibly be train lights.

"Your head plays tricks on you especially when you're in a place that's underground and is dark, damp and cold. The temperature is about 15 degrees colder in the tunnel, so any burst of air from the tunnel is cold and could contribute for the strange winds people encounter," she said.

One tale she found was about a hunter, Frank Webster, who disappeared near the tunnel in 1874. Webster was found days later, beaten and without his rifle. He claimed strange voices called him into the tunnel, where a ghost took his gun and then beat him.

Fabrications?

"There's nothing to prove some person didn't do it. I think a lot of stories are fabricated. I think this is where a lot of stories come into play," she said.

She said the tunnel's history has taken on its own life, with varying versions of the circumstances of the tunnel workers deaths and even discrepancies of what the term 'hoosac' actually means.

"In my research I found many people wrote the American Indian word 'hoosac' was supposed to mean forbidden. It actually means "stone place" in Mohican," Kowalski said.

George Inman, a junior, studied the underground subculture of vampyrism and the characteristics of the movements followers.

"There are two kinds of vampires, those who believe they are psychic vampires and that they feed off of other people's minds and those who are more traditional and feed off of blood. They cut themselves and feed off of each other," he said.

Inman said a lot of the subculture is influenced by the original inspiration for Dracula, Vlad the Impaler. He said the followers dress in black and claim they are sensitive to light, such as Vlad did.

"They also all seem to play Vampire: The Masquerade. It's huge around the world and they claim that it allows them social acceptance. The popularity is unbelievable," Inman said.

He said the followers of vampyrism seem to have similar characteristics: emotional irritability and instability, depression, belief in psychic powers, a strong sex drive and a "thirst" best described as comparable to a migraine headache.

"They seem to have a seclusionary lifestyle, but coming together gives them a sense of community and a release of romanticism," Inman said.

Senior Jodi Browning of Plaistow, N.H., focused on the phenomenon of alien abduction claims. In her research, she found over 6,000 Americans have claimed to be abducted since 1960.

"There is no documentation of abductions before the 1960s," she said. "Another odd thing is that a very large percentage of abductees claim to have telepathically communicated with the aliens, but the conversations take place in English."

While Browning did not discredit the possibility of aliens existing, she did say she leaned toward believing the empirical studies done by psychologists which seem to link many abduction stories with traumatic events, including sexual abuse.

"The empirical studies are more objective. I tend to believe that for some people it is easier for them to believe they were abused by aliens. I also think there is a large connection between media influence and hallucinations with the claims," she said.

Another student's study showed that there is no solid link between healing and the practice of Reiki, while an investigation into chiropractic services found that autistic children receiving the therapy had positive results including increased speech and vocalization, better bladder control and an evening of leg lengths.




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Jennifer Huberdeau can be reached at jhuberdeau@thetranscript.com.

The mystery of the Monument Mountain stone heap

guest story borrowed from The Advocate Weekly, April 06, 2006

The mystery of the Monument Mountain stone heap
By LION G MILES



Thursday, April 06

In 1882, Charles J. Taylor published his "History of Great Barrington," a generally well-researched account that still is the standard chronicle of the early days of that town.

As accurate as Taylor tried to be, some serious historical errors inevitably found their way into his book. On pages 60-62, he inserted the text of a letter that appears authentic but is actually a put-up job, if not an outright forgery. It contains information that has been accepted over the years, things like the word "Mahaiwe" and the size of the famous Indian stone heap that gives Monument Mountain its name, but recent research in primary manuscript sources tells a different story.

Taylor found the letter in a rather dubious source, The Berkshire Courier of November 15, 1866. It immediately becomes suspicious because neither the writer nor the recipient are identified. The dateline of "Indian Town" in November 1735 is anachronistic because there was no Indian town at that time, the Mohicans not receiving their grant at Stockbridge until the next year. In the letter's description of the Rev. John Sergeant's baptism of Chief Konkapot, it borrows word for word the profession of faith delivered by another Indian (Ebenezer) in 1734, the text of which is found in Rev. Sergeant's journal. In fact, there is little information in the letter that could not have been found in Sergeant's journal or other printed sources. The main exception is the name "Mahaiwe," which is not found elsewhere to my knowledge. Taylor said it is the Mohican word for "place down stream" but admitted it should be spelled "Neh-hai-we." While that may be true (the related Delaware tribe used the word "Nahiwi" for "down the river"), the confusion added to the suspicious nature of the letter.

Another anomaly in the letter is the statement that the "Great Wigwam" of Chief Umpachene was "at the ford a mile or two south [of Monument Mountain]." Presumably this is the spot now commemorated by a marker at the "Old Indian Fordway" on Bridge Street. The marker claims that there was a battle with the Indians there in 1676, but it is documented that the fight occurred further to the south, probably in Sheffield. The other error is in the location of the "Great Wigwam," which was on the Green River two miles to the south. Sergeant's journal clearly shows that the two groups of Indians lived 8 to 10 miles apart, Konkapot in the meadow at Wnahktukook (Stockbridge) and Lieutenant Umpachene at Scatekook (Green River). When Sergeant first arrived at Great Barrington in 1734, he wrote that "I board at Mr. Ingersol's; and teach the Children at the Lieutnts. Wigwam." For the first six months of his mission Sergeant, lived with David Ingersoll at his house near the present site of the Mason Library and taught the Indians two miles south at Scatekook.

The greatest fallacy in Taylor's letter relates to the stone heap at Monument Mountain. It is described as "a pile of stones some six or eight feet in diameter, circular at its base and raised in the form of an obtuse cone. It is raised over the grave of the first Sachem who died after they came into this region. Each Indian, as he goes by, adds a stone to the pile." This wording is so close to that in the 1829 "History of Berkshire County" that it suggests copying, but the text is different enough to indicate some alteration: "The pile was six or eight feet in diameter, circular at its base and raised in the form of an obtuse cone ... over the grave of one of the Aborigines. ... Every Indian who passed the place, threw a stone upon the tomb of his countryman." No source is given for the 1829 version, but it is possible that it was the creation of the Rev. David Dudley Field, who had collected the materials for the history. Curiously, it was his son, Jonathan Edwards Field, who had provided the Taylor letter to the Berkshire Courier in 1866.

Further evidence for the falsity of the Taylor letter is found in Timothy Dwight's "Travels in New England and New York" (published in 1821 but written in the 1790s), which states that the name of Monument Mountain "is derived from a pile of stones about six or eight feet in diameter, circular at its base, and raised in the form of an obtuse cone over the grave of one of the Aborigines," etc. Certainly this is the source of the quote in Taylor's book, a secondary account first written in 1798 and not an eyewitness report of 1735. Dwight did not see the stone pile himself and was relying on hearsay.

Until now, we have had only three published eyewitness accounts of the monument, none of which give specific details of its size or location. Sergeant wrote in his journal on November 3, 1734: "There is a LARGE Heap of Stones, I suppose TEN CART LOADS, in the Way to Wnahktukook, which the Indians have thrown together, as they pass'd by the Place; for it us'd to be their Custom, every Time any one pass'd by, to throw a Stone to it; But what was the End of it they cannot tell" (Emphasis is mine). The Rev. Gideon Hawley wrote an account of a journey he made in 1753. Upon observing an Indian stone heap in New York State, he wrote: "The LARGEST heap I ever observed, is that LARGE collection of small stones on the mountain between Stockbridge and Great-Barrington." In 1761 David Ingersoll stated that "he saw a LARGE heap of stones on the east side of Westenhook or Housatonnock River so called on the southerly end of the Mountain called Monument Mountain."

I emphasize the use of the adjective LARGE to describe the monument. It seems unlikely that a stone pile of only six or eight feet in diameter would be sufficient to fill the ten cart loads mentioned by Sergeant. The truth is that the stone heap was quite large and obvious. In the fall of 1761, Colonel John Van Rensselaer of Claverack, N.Y., employed a surveying party to establish the boundary line between the Van Rensselaer and Livingston Manors of Columbia County. He claimed ownership to the Housatonic River and charged his surveyors to run the line 24 miles east of the Hudson River, bringing it into the present bounds of Great Barrington. On November 25, 1761, Jacob Philip, one of his chain men, deposed in Albany County court and declared: "they Run about half a Mile west of a Heap of Stones Standing on the Southerly End of a Mountain near the Road from Sheffield to Stockbridge - that he and the Rest of the Chainbearers by the Surveyors Directions Measured the said Heap and found it Eighty two Links about the Bottom and seventeen Links high along the Slant of the Said Heap." A link of the chain equaled 7.92 inches so the monument in Great Barrington measured slightly more than 54 feet at the base and stood over 11 feet high, the size of a small house.

Other residents of Berkshire and Albany Counties testified to having seen the large pile and that the bottom stones were sunk deep into the ground, suggesting great antiquity. There was no evidence of a burial beneath the monument although the results of the survey did show two heaps of stones along the line in Columbia County "Erected by the Indians in Memory of two of their Sachems buried in that place." The English settlers at this time were dismantling the numerous stone heaps to obtain building materials, especially for chimneys, and the Great Barrington heap suffered the same fate. It was "all removed" by August 1762 and there has been no trace of it since, despite the many later efforts to find it.

Most contemporary accounts state that the monument was "near" the road (not "on" it) at the southern end of Monument Mountain, and none indicates that it was visible from the road. The earliest map of Stockbridge is a surveyor's plat dated October 15, 1736. On it at the northwest corner of Sheffield (now Great Barrington) is written the bearing of east nine degrees south, 932 perch (rods), "to the monument of stones," and another notation that the monument was north of Moses King's property, 60 perch. This stone heap was located on top of the mountain at the midpoint of the boundary between Great Barrington and Stockbridge and served as a marker between the two towns. It was not the large monument erected by the Indians.

The best evidence for the location of the Indian stone heap comes from the court depositions of those settlers who actually saw it before it was removed. Captain Johannis Hogeboom of Claverack testified in 1762 that it stood "some rod[s] over the Westenhook [Housatonic] River under a Mountain." The half-blood Indian, Joseph Van Gelder, testified in 1768 that it was "on the East side of Westenhook River has been close to it often it is about a Mile from the River." Timothy Woodbridge of Stockbridge deposed that it was "in the Monument Mountain Made of Wood and Stones ... It lies in Great [Barrington] 3 Miles south of Stockbridge." John Philip, the chain man, ran his survey line along the Housatonic "about half a Mile west" of the heap. These distances give us an approximate location for the monument somewhere east of the river at the foot of the mountain and south of Risingdale, far from the traditionally-accepted spot but close to the site of the Indian hunting camp excavated in 1991.

By all accounts, the stone heap bore the Mohican name "Wawanaquasick," a lovely word that might have graced the new schools at Monument Mountain instead of the unimaginative names selected last year. It meant "offering place" and was applied to other Indian stone heaps in our area. Jehoiakim Van Valkenburgh, a Dutch settler who spoke the Mohican language, declared in 1768 that the Indians "added Stones to it and when they did so they said Grand father I recover you." The monument had a practical function as well. Chief Yocum explained in 1754 that there were two such heaps in Great Barrington, the one we are discussing here and the other where the Green River meets the Housatonic. They served as boundary markers between Stockbridge Indian chieftaincies and the Weatogue Indians of Salisbury, Conn.

Taylor wrote an essential history of Great Barrington, but the inclusion of a doctored letter has contributed to a number of misconceptions. The name "Mahaiwe" is possibly a made-up word, the location of the "Great Wigwam" is off by at least two miles and the great Indian stone heap at Monument Mountain was not only quite large but located "under the mountain" near Risingdale instead of on the mountain itself. Though it has been gone for 244 years, it remains in our imaginations as an enduring symbol of Berkshire County's first inhabitants.


Historian Lion G. Miles of Stockbridge specializes in 18th century Berkshire County history.

Armageddon Wraps up Early at the Hancock Shaker Village

This region is full of biblically epic sounding sites, many of which don't appear on any standard map. Spots like Devil's Pulpit, North Adam's Witch's Cave, New Marlboro's Gomorrah and its companion Sodom just over in Connecticut (as well as a separate 'Sodom' in Tyringham).

Most of these places have their own little bit of lore attached to them, but perhaps none are the focus of a yarn as epically Biblical as that surrounding Mount Sinai, on the grounds of the Hancock Shaker Village. Named for the mountain where Moses laid down the law(s) for the Israelites, later the site of a monastery built where the remains of St. Catherine of Alexandria were said to have been miraculously transported, this Berkshire hill was alleged to be the site of a grand, apocalyptic confrontation between religious fervor and preternatural evil.

As the story goes, it was a time of distress and difficulty for the Shakers; sin and the temptations of a lustful world had severely tested the devout people of the community. Some local boys had recently been caught playing with the "Devil's cards" [likely regular playing cards]. From other sister communities came news of affairs and elopements between formerly devout Sisters and the most degenerate unbelievers. In the Hancock village meetinghouse, Elder Gabriel Patton harangued the community, bellowing fire and brimstone, with constant, thunderous warnings to be vigil against the influence of the Devil, who seemed to be encroaching on all sides.


Now, there was among them one Sister Martha Tomlinson, a young woman who had come to the community from the eastern part of the state, who had previously lost both her husband and young child to disease. When she had first accepted the Shaker life, she had seemed contented enough, but now a dark state of depression overtook her frequently, often keeping her weeping throughout the night. In the daylight hours, Sister Martha had become increasingly aloof, and apparently ambivalent to the Shaker beliefs. This had come to the attention of some of the other Sisters, and to a lesser extent the Elders as well. Meanwhile, however, Elder Patton had become convinced of the presence of Satan concentrating atop the hill they called Mount Sinai - and, more importantly, convinced of his vulnerability. Sinai, Patton told the others, would be the site where the faithful of the community would defeat the Evil One once and for all; he implored them to steel themselves for the Final Battle.



When the day that had been set for the campaign arrived, Sister Tomlinson became violently ill, and remained in her bed, weak and feverish. All the others gathered, though, every able-bodied man and woman in the community. They rallied in the meetinghouse, where the Elders fitted each of them with a suit of invisible armor, describing its virtues and its powers to shield the faithful from Satan's power. Thus befitted with breastplates of righteousness and the helmets of salvation, they prepared to make war, Ephesians 6:10-17 style. They set out in the early morning darkness, each carrying a Bible in their hands. They advanced on the enemy on the hill in a wide ring, singing hymns and holding out their invisible swords of the Spirit. They advanced nearly shoulder to shoulder; there was not single weak point in their line, and they swiftly began narrowing the circle around the Unspeakable One. He remained invisible, but as they drew the noose tighter and tighter, a malodorous stench filled the air. The Believers recognized the stink: it was the smell of sulfur, of brimstone. Finally the ring of the fellowship became so taut that they were looking into each other's eyes across its center, a massive racket was ensuing in between, sounds of choking growls, rasping curses and a hissing like that of a thousand writhing snakes. Patton roared out to them to advance still further, to leave no escape for suffocated demon. Then, with "one long cry of hatred and baffled anger," the Lord of Darkness expired.

There are a variety of epilogues appended to various versions of this legend. In several tellings, the successful Shakers return to find that Martha Tomlinson has ended her own life, apparently as a last victim of the Devil's wily and desperate tempting. In one version, the flock repairs to the meetinghouse for an ecstatic bout of dancing worship, in which the apparition of John the Baptist comes among them as a blessing. Of course, I prefer the versions that end with a warning: for even though, allegedly, the Prince of Lies himself was vanquished, many of his demonic imps lurk the world still. Furthermore, on some dark and foreboding nights, they may appear at Mount Sinai to pay their respects, and perhaps wreak some bit of vengeful mischief.




As for its historical basis, well. there were Shakers at Shaker Village, but that may be about the extent of the corroboration possible. Frequently, a legend with so many named persons, consistent in version after version, offers some promise for further research but in this case proved a dead end. According to Jerry Grant, Director of Research at the Shaker Museum and Library in Chatham, N.Y., neither Tomlinson nor Patton appears in the list of known Shakers.

"The Sister it may have been possible to miss by the record keepers, but I don't think they would have missed an Elder in the records," Grant explained.
It is quite probable the story may not even have originated with the Shakers, but with neighboring tale-tellers in the area. It was fairly well-traveled by the late-19th century, and may have first appeared in a mid-century newspaper article. Its ultimate origin is murky, but it smacks of fireside fiction. Which is fine by me, I'd rather not contemplate the literal reality of wandering demons in Hancock, especially considering the fact the Imps of Hell rarely turn out to be the sort of eloquent, irreproachably fashion-savvy types seen in the "Hellraiser" movies. Still, it's an irresistible yarn, as far as I'm concerned, and there's plenty more meat to the story, too ponderous to include here. I recommend the interested reader to my favorite treatment, in Willard Douglas Coxey's 1936 "Ghosts of Old Berkshire." The true underlying sweep of the story may be that of a young woman's struggle with depression and loss and her gradual embitterment against the Shaker way of life, with its repression of all passion, all intimacy, all form of personal existence. I picture a period piece boasting Charlize Theron opposite Anthony Hopkins' Elder Patton, all on location, with more exotic dance sequences than "Moulin Rouge" - real Oscar vehicular momentum. But that's another story altogether.


Sources:

Coxey, Willard Douglas. Ghosts of Old Berkshire, 1936

Skinner, Charles M. Myths and Legends of our own Land, 1898

“Our Berkshires: Calling all ghosts.” Berkshire Evening Eagle Oct 27, 1944

Pittsfield's Hebrew scrolls spark Mormon controversy

Thursday, March 02

When Joseph Merrick, local farmer and innkeeper, purchased a tract of land in west Pittsfield in 1800, he had no expectation that it would prove such fertile ground for growing mystery. Indeed, it was not until 15 years later that a seemingly innocuous piece of refuse found there would go on to arouse the interest of the town's most prominent citizens, and to serve as a potentially crucial clue in controversy surrounding the origins of the Book of Mormon.

In June of 1815, a boy Merrick had employed to clear a piece of yard presented him with a leather strap found among the debris left by plowing. Merrick at first threw it in a box and paid little attention. Only looking at it later did he realize that there was something inside the strap. He cut it open to find several tightly scrolled pieces of parchment. Each was inscribed with Hebrew characters of some sort. Perplexed, Merrick shared the discovery with some of the most learned men at the First Congregational Church, where he served as a deacon. He didn't have to try very hard to get their attention. He had only barely mentioned the find when he found himself called on by a number of curious visitors. Rumors of the object quickly reached Elkanah Watson, father of the American Agricultural Society and probably Pittsfield's most illustrious citizen at the time. Watson wrote in a letter "immediately on hearing of the discovery, I repaired to the house of Mr. Merrick, where I found several clergymen whose curiosity was [also] greatly excited by the strange incident.."

Among those present when Watson arrived was 20-year-old Sylvester Larned, fresh from seminary but already "greatly distinguished for talents and moving eloquence." Larned, though exceedingly well educated for the times, lacked any knowledge of Hebrew. This required the help of William Allen, son of "Fighting Parson" Thomas Allen, and the minister of First Congregational Church at the time. Allen identified the object as a Jewish phylactery, containing four pieces of parchment inscribed with verses from Deuteronomy and Exodus.

Now that they knew what it was, the question of where it came from became all the more exciting to them. No Jewish family or individual had ever lived at that location, so far as anyone knew. Before Merrick it had been the site of "Fort Hill" or Fort Ashley, a blockhouse built by colonial militia during the French and Indian War. Prior to that the area was called "Indian Hill," in reference to it being the site of a former Mohican settlement, and it was this earlier occupation that most intrigued the Pittsfield scholars. In their mind, the phylactery fit quite perfectly into a debate that had begun more than a century and a half before. The theory that the American Indians were descendants of the lost tribes of Israel had first been advanced in 1650, with the publication of Thorowgood's "Jewes in America" and had been a subject of perennial interest in Puritan New England ever since. Watson had already leaped to this conclusion, stating "the artifact must have found its way into this recent wilderness by the agency of some descendants of Israel. this discovery forms another link in the evidence by which our Indians are identified with the ancient Jews." After his initial inspection, Allen was inclined to agree that the phylactery "furnished proof that our Indians were descendants of the ancient chosen people." Adding weight to this conclusion was the late testimony of Dr. West of Stockbridge that "an old Indian" had told him that his ancestors had once "been in the possession of a book which they had, not long since, carried with them, but having lost the knowledge of reading it, they buried it with an Indian Chief."

Shortly thereafter, Allen sent the artifact to Abiel Holmes, a scholar in Cambridge. There is no record of Holmes' opinion, only that he delivered the phylactery to the American Antiquarian Society, on Allen's urging. Nothing much was said or done about the phylactery for several years after that. Most of the parties who had viewed it (and many who hadn't) believed it to be evidence of the Hebrew origins of Native Americans, but by 1816 or so no one outside of select sectarian circles seemed much interested in proving that point. In the early 1820s, Ethan Smith, a congregational minister in Poultney, Vt., became interested in the Pittsfield phylactery. Though he never actually saw it personally, he described it in his 1823 book "View of the Hebrews: The Lost Tribes of Israel in America." That same year, a young man in Palmyra, N.Y., announced that he was to receive a set of plates from an angel. The man was Joseph Smith and the plates were said to contain a history of ancient America.

Later, when these plates were being translated, Oliver Cowdery, one of original "Three Witnesses" of Mormonism's Golden Plates, joined Smith and became the major scribe who assisted in Smith's translation. Cowdery hailed from Poultney, where he had been a parishioner of Ethan Smith's congregational flock and quite likely owned a copy of his book. For this reason, nearly two centuries of skeptics and opponents to Mormonism have theorized that Ethan Smith's ideas, along with certain elements of his style (e.g., his heavy quotation of the Book of Isaiah) may have been one of two major sources of influence on the Book of Mormon (the other being a fictional manuscript by Solomon Spaulding that Smith friend and follower Sidney Rigdon may have provided. It is certain that Joseph Smith did become aware of View of the Hebrews at some point, for he cites it and the artifact found in Pittsfield as supporting evidence of the "Lost Tribes" in America. Furthermore, it is entirely conceivable that Smith could have already have heard of the phylactery prior to 1823.

By then, though, no on was sure where the darned thing was. Isaiah Thomas, the first president of the antiquarian society, told Ethan Smith that he didn't know where it was, or even where to go about looking. Several historians have made attempt over the years to track its whereabouts after being delivered to the society, coming up with only fragmentary possible scenarios. It may or may not have been returned to Sylvester Larned, who in 1818 expressed disappointment that nothing had come of the find. Larned may or may not in turn have sent it to Elias Boudinot, another interested scholar. Larned died of Yellow Fever two years later in New Orleans, at the age of 25, and there is no sign of the phylactery in Boudinot's papers, housed at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. I tend to think that the Hebrew inscriptions are still in the hands of the Antiquarians - in fact, one AAS librarian in 1917 said that he seemed to remember seeing the scrolls but not didn't know where. As such, it is one of hundreds of fascinating, potentially paradigm-shaking artifacts which resides in a Library Limbo, lost, uncataloged or misfiled in one of the country's major archives or museums.

What relevance does the Pittsfield discovery have today, anyway? Scientific knowledge has advanced, well, let's say slightly, since the early 1800s, at least to a point where belief in Native American groups as descendants of lost Israelite tribes can be effectively dismissed. On the other hand, scholarly opinion over the past decade has increasingly shifted toward the concept of the Americas being an occasional stopping point of many different world groups prior to Columbus. In 1924, some lead artifacts, mostly crosses and swords, with Hebrew and early Latin inscriptions were dug up in Tucson, Ariz. The inscriptions told of a group of Romanized Jews who left the Empire and whose ship (apparently) came to shore in the Gulf of Mexico, from which point they followed the Colorado River inland, establishing a briefly flourishing colony. Of course, questions were raised about the authenticity of the artifacts and, like the Pittsfield phylactery, the "Tucson Crosses" went missing for many years before finally showing up on display at the University of Arizona campus in 2003.

For those who prefer to get somewhat cleaner shave out of old Ockham's razor, an alternate explanation was offered by William Allen, some time after the object left his care, though no one paid much attention. Allen noted that the strap was found in a place where wood chips and dirt had been collecting for years, and he was unable to find out whether it had come from the old earth beneath or from among the recent debris. He did learn that Merrick had employed British and German prisoners during the War of 1812, one of whom could have dropped it there. For my contribution, I'd append that it could have been lost there even earlier. The entire county was suddenly inundated with Hessian deserters following Burgoyne's defeat at Saratoga in 1777 - some of whom never left - and any one of whom could have been the owner of the 18th-century equivalent of a scriptural fanny pack.

Of course, modern forensics could probably provide snappy answers to almost all of the questions surrounding the legendary scripts, if one could only put one's finger on the troublesome strip. "Or," as Charles Fort more eloquently put it, "there could be a real science, if there were really anything to be scientific about."

Psych. Ward Escapee Questioned in Unsolved Local Murders

http://www.berkshireeagle.com/headlines/ci_3548821

Demagall hunt was too slow
Murder suspect to be questioned in two unsolved county stabbings
By Jack Dew, Berkshire Eagle Staff


Though William S. Demagall was considered a serious threat to himself and others when he escaped Feb. 9 from a locked psychiatric unit at Berkshire Medical Center, police did not launch a broad search for him and didn't identify him as missing for two days, according to an Eagle analysis of police records and interviews with officials involved in the case.
Between Feb. 9 and Feb. 11, when Demagall allegedly murdered George Mancini in Hillsdale, N.Y., it appears there was no widespread hunt for Demagall. The first time he popped onto a police radar screen was on Feb. 10, when his father asked the Pittsfield Police Department to check his old apartment. While police did make that check, they did not enter Demagall into the database for missing persons until Saturday, Feb. 11, according to records kept of police activity during those days.

Now, while Demagall is being held without bail in a New York state jail, Berkshire County investigators apparently are asking whether he could have been involved in the unsolved murders of Jan Stackhouse in Stockbridge and Anthony Colucci in Washington.

Demagall's cousin, John Hobart, 21, of Westfield, has been charged with robbery, and police say he drove Demagall to Mancini's house expecting to rob the man of drugs.

Early report issued

Demagall, a slight 22-year-old with close-cropped hair and a tattoo of a pitchfork on his forehead and arms, allegedly slipped between the bars of a secure courtyard at Berkshire Medical Center's Jones 3 unit on Feb. 9, according to a report provided to The Eagle by a person familiar with the investigation.

The source, who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to release the report, said the two-page statement was faxed to the Pittsfield Police Department shortly after 1 a.m. on Feb. 10, after hospital personnel had called the department to notify it of Demagall's escape.

"Demegall (sic) is at risk of serious harm to himself or others by virtue of his mental illness," the report said. "As of (Feb. 10), he is paranoid and has stated on 2/3/06 that he would 'hurt anyone who tries to keep him from his freedom.' "

The report said Demagall had stockpiled knives and guns in two caves in the Stockbridge woods over the past two months and had "placed a large shard of glass above a barn door in his grandmother's barn, essentially booby trapping the door."

The report listed six places where Demagall might be found, including his father's former apartment, his grandmother's house and the caves in Stockbridge. It said he might also be hiding in the hospital, though he had last been seen heading north on North Street and had not been seen circling back.

But there is no record in the Pittsfield Police Department's log of either the phone call or the faxed report, and there is no indication that police began looking for Demagall until the next day. Chief Anthony J. Riello said he will conduct a review tomorrow of incoming calls to determine when the hospital first contacted his department.

Riello said he believes his department first became aware Demagall might be in trouble on Feb. 10, when Demagall's father called from New York and asked police to check the father's old apartment on North Pearl Street in Pittsfield, saying his son might stay there. Riello said officers did, but saw no sign of him.

Demagall was not treated as a missing person until Feb. 11 — two days after his escape and the same day he allegedly stabbed and beat George Mancini to death. Again, it was Demagall's father who contacted police, and officers entered Demagall into a national database. When Demagall was picked up the next day in Schodack, N.Y., authorities found his name in the computer and notified Pittsfield he had been found, according to the police log and Riello.

Hospital spokesman Michael Leary could not be reached for comment about the report to police or its timing. In an earlier interview, he said it is hospital policy to alert authorities immediately if someone leaves the locked Jones 3 psychiatric ward without authorization.

Jones 3 is a 15-bed facility that treats people suffering from major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. It is designed to offer patients who might



be suicidal, violent or incapable of caring for themselves an environment where they can be stabilized and treated; it is not a prison or jail, and while there are bars on the windows, there are no armed guards. Every effort is made to avoid using restraints on patients, and they are allowed a great deal of movement within the unit.

Dr. Alex Sabo, chairman of Berkshire Medical Center's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, said Jones 3 has treated 2,500 patients over the past five years. In that span, only four have escaped. Neither Sabo nor Leary would talk about Demagall or even acknowledge that he had been a patient at Jones 3.

Sometime before 8:58 a.m. on Feb. 11, Demagall entered Mancini's first floor apartment on Breezy Hill Road and stabbed the 56-year-old repeatedly, according to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Albany. Demagall told police that when Mancini didn't die quickly enough he beat him with a paperweight wrapped in a sock, the affidavit states.

Demagall then searched the apartment for drugs, according to the affidavit, and material he could use to build a fire, which he piled on top of Mancini's corpse. When firefighters arrived at 8:58 a.m., they found Mancini's body.

Mancini had only recently moved to Hillsdale. He retired from the Career Institute of Technology in Forks Township, Pa., in 2004, after teaching math for 24 years at the vocational school.

Ronald Roth, the school's director, described Mancini as a gifted teacher who taught all levels and all students.

Asked whether he could envision Mancini being involved with drugs, Roth said, "No. I can't imagine that."

He said everyone who knew Mancini was "shocked and surprised" at his death.

Demagall has been described by officials and acquaintances as a skilled survivalist who had taken to living in the woods on Monument Mountain in Stockbridge. He slept in caves and only sought other shelter when winter temperatures became intolerable.

A former classmate, who asked that her name be withheld because she doesn't want to be associated with Demagall, recalled seeing him in the bar at Pearl's, an upscale Great Barrington steak house. She said he was carrying a large, sheathed hunting knife and trying to bum drinks off friends.

Demagall's caves are located about a mile from the rural Stockbridge road where Jan Stackhouse was found dead on May 1, 2005.

According to an autopsy on Stackhouse, the 52-year-old New York City resident bled to death after a stab wound to the neck. While investigators have said repeatedly that they have made progress in the case, there have been no visible leads.

A person familiar with the Stackhouse investigation said authorities have been struck by Demagall's profile and are interested in talking to him about the case. Though at this point they have not named Demagall a suspect, there are some obvious parallels between his alleged behavior and the place and manner in which Stackhouse died.

Similarly, they want to speak with Demagall about the death of Anthony Colucci, 20, who died from multiple stab wounds on July 4, 2005. Authorities believe he was killed in the Washington section of October Mountain State Forest, about five miles from the spot where Stackhouse's body was found.

District Attorney David Capeless declined comment.

"I will not comment on whether or not we are looking at any specific individual as a suspect or witness in any case. But I would say that, when we become aware of information in the course of investigations such as these, we look into it and pursue it accordingly," Capeless said.

Second Sight in the Berkshires

According to polls over the last few years, about three quarters of Americans believe in some form of paranormal experience, with more than half of all surveyed adults reporting having had at least one truly paranormal experience in their life.

Some advocates of the reality of Psi (psychic phenomenon) believe that it may be even more common in everyday life than many people have even considered. British biologist Rupert Sheldrake has attempted to muster evidence that such experiences as the sense of being stared at, or thinking of someone who just then telephones, are often examples of extra-sensory faculties complimenting the ordinary senses.

This all made this article difficult to write. I have wanted for some time to put together some verbiage summarizing some of the more colorful incidents in the Berkshires' "psychic" history, but the question of what to include hung over the enterprise. For reasons made obvious above, it would be impossible to give a true overview of every premonition, dream or divinatory luck any Berkshire resident may have ever had, and to relay every such story that has ever been related to me by someone locally would certainly put me over my allotted words. It would also probably be dull - often as not, one person's oracular epiphany is another's yawning cue to leave. I will therefore keep this history confined to a brief sketch of some of the more novel local occurrences drawn from newspapers and from the annals of psychical research.

People have always been interested in prophecies, predictions and all manner of mental mysteries for all of human history, but it was not until the second half of the 19th century that Americans en masse began expressing great interest in the psychic world. Following the table-rapping shenanigans of the Fox sisters in Hydesville, N.Y., in 1848, the spiritualism craze spread through the country like wildfire. In its wake came the very first efforts to study psychic happenings in an organized, scholarly way.

In 1880, a student at Williams College reported a "most singular dream." He had been recovering from an illness just a week before commencement, and while sleeping in the early evening on June 28, he had a feverishly vivid dream that he was on a steamer off of Long Island, watching another steamer burning. Its starboard wheelhouse was ablaze and all that could be made out of the name of the boat were the last three letters "AKA." The craft ran aground and people were leaping off, some drowning. A friend who'd come to check on him woke him, and he relayed the dream to him. The following evening, the friend returned, excited, and began quizzing him about his dream. He then took out a newspaper account of the disaster that had befallen the steamer Seawanhaka. Seawanhaka caught fire at about the same time as the dreamer been asleep - between 5 and 6:30 p.m. the previous day - while passing the "Hell Gate" of the East River, site of many lost boats. The steamer had run aground while burning up, and passengers had leapt off in panicked swarms, with nearly 50 drowning.

In 1914, psychic investigators Richard Hodgson and James Hyslop compared his written testimony about the dream with subsequent newspaper accounts offering more information on the Seawanhaka tragedy and identified many additional similarities of which the Williams College man and his friend were apparently not aware.

By the turn of the century, the Berkshires had become a favored spot for traveling mediums. North Adams in particular seems to have provided fertile ground for fortune telling. More than two dozen professional clairvoyants were advertising in the Transcript between 1895 and 1901. Some of the most colorful included M.Leo Balzac ("All diseases, mysterious feelings, habits, lost physical power etc. positively cured without medicine or the knife OR NO PAY!"), Madame Bartell ("tells the past, present and reveals the future"), Madame Drusilla ("63 Center St., Ladies fifty cents. Gent $1"), Karl von Roth-Hamong ("famous Palmist, Clairvoyant, Astrologist and Author"), and Ora the Mystic ("The Greatest Living Clairvoyant"). My personal favorite, Professor Delano (World's Greatest Life Reader, Clairvoyant and Palmist)," purchased large, lavishly

drawn advertisements - Marvelous Revelations! Magnificent Achievements! People are astonished - throughout the summer of 1899.

But not all would-be seers fared as well. The Eagle reports that in April of 1897, A.R. Devlin, medium and clairvoyant, left Dalton with a light purse, "as business was anything but rushing."

In the '30s and '40s, the most prominent psychic in the area was Clara Jepson of Pownal, whom I already profiled in The Advocate in November 2004. At the time of her reign, her closest competition was Mrs. Elmas Dicranian of Pittsfield. Whereas Clara was known mainly for her success in locating lost valuables, using a handkerchief to divine their whereabouts, Mrs. Dicranian was known primarily for her ability to locate water with a dowsing rod. On occasion, though, she also had visions, which she believed to be of a psychic nature, akin to what some scientists call "remote viewing." Three days after the Eagle interviewed Mrs. Jepson on her feeling on the Lindbergh kidnapping (she suggested that the boy was safe and that he was near his Hopewell, N.J., home - tragically, only the second part proved correct), Mrs. Dicranian told them her view, that he had been kidnapped by "a jealous flier friend of his father."

Likewise, shortly after Jepson was consulted on the disappearance of Paula Welden, Elmas took a bus to Bennington, where she attempted, unsuccessfully,

to lead a detective to the location of the missing girl's body. Meanwhile, in Lenox, psychic reader Mademoiselle Bathsheba Askowith was handling private consultations, dinner parties and lectures.

A number of other miscellaneous occurrences have made their way into paranormal literature. In October and November of 1920, Monterey was the site of two of a series of tests known as the Joan Dale Psychometry Experiments, conducted by Dr. Walter Franklin Prince. In these experiments, the subject Joan Dale (pseudonym) was able to divulge large amounts of previously unknown but verifiable details about a particular person by touching a sealed, shielded envelope.

In 1967, Francis Sibolski of Pittsfield wrote an article for Fate magazine detailing a recurrent vision he'd had over the years of two apparitional men fighting on his street corner alongside a vintage 1937 Plymouth taxicab. He later discovered later that there had been a nasty brawl identical to his vision at the spot between two men in 1938, one of whom died soon after. Some theorists call this type of experience retrocognition.

Many parapsychologists and other scientists at universities around the world maintain that various modern scientific research efforts - such as experiments at Princeton with the effect of the mind on random number generating machines, the remote viewing project run by the U.S. military and experiments with what is known as the Ganzfeld technique, which involves subjects in a state of slight sensory deprivation - offer sufficient evidence for the existence of some forms of Psi, though the mechanism by which it operates remains a matter of speculation. Skeptics, most notably psychologists Susan Blackmore and Ray Hyman, contend that is has not been proven, because many of the individual experiments which make up the available sample of evidence collected over the decades may have been flawed, leaving room for error, cheating and faulty analysis.

Some say that you have to witness a real psychic occurrence to believe it. Others find relevance in the old saying: "For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not, no explanation is sufficient." Maybe, but I've always preferred Thomas Huxley's suggestion that a "wise man apportions his belief to the evidence." In this case, that might mean that you can believe that psychic experiences are possible without necessarily buying into every carpetbagger who rides through town, or believing that any combination of psychic happenings could tell you all you need to know about your life.

The Devil at Wizard’s Glen

The considerable body of local legend attributed to the area’s pre-colonial native inhabitants presents an interesting puzzle for any Berkshire folklorist to ponder. Early European settlers had some contact with so-called “Stockbridge Indians” – Mohican (sometimes called Mahican) combined with sundry remnants of related tribes- continuously for more than sixty years, and certainly there was a great interchange of stories and cultural ideas. Unfortunately, the majority of the staple Native legends recycled in Berkshire histories and travelogues were not recorded in print until nearly a century after the last of the Stockbridge Mohicans had migrated out of the area. One of the results of this is that much of the existing body of native lore sounds… rather white.

One legend in particular strikes me as a particularly illuminating example of a nucleus of information about indigenous life, embellished by a thick layer of old-fashioned Yankee Puritan storytelling. I am referring to an old tradition surrounding the spot known as Wizard’s Glen, off Gulf Road in Dalton. This gorge, with its rugged jumbling of heaped rock was described by Godfrey Greylock 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…”

Wizard’s Glen draws its name from the belief that this place was a sacred haunt for generations of local Indian shamans, a place of power where they conducted rituals and communed with their spirits. In particular, it was said that they were working incantations to Hobbomocco, the “spirit of Evil.” One broad, square rock with crimson became known as Devil’s Altar, and it was here, rumor had it, that the tribal sorcerers offered up human sacrifices. The crimson stains in the stone were said by early townspeople to be bloodstains, from the many victims ritually slaughtered there.

Several sources from the late 19th and early 20th centuries relay a story attributed to a Dalton man named John Chamberlain. Chamberlain, as sources have him, was “no lover of the Indian race,” which may help to explain some of the content of this legend. The tale itself, as Chamberlain is said to have related it personally, is as follows. Sometime around 1770, he had been hunting and after chasing a deer a great distance, finally slew it around dusk, within the area of the Glen. As he was tending to his kill, a heavy thunderstorm came suddenly, complete with driving rain and hail. He stashed the deer under one boulder and slunk himself into the recess under another. There he tried to catch a little rest while he waited out the storm. He had a clear view of the Devil’s Altar, and as he dozed he tried to put out of his mind the stories he’d heard of the terrible rites that were sometimes conducted here.

The storm was getting progressively worse, with huge claps of thunder blasting overhead. It grew louder and louder until one enormous explosion of lightning lit up the entire night. At that moment, Chamberlain saw the Devil appear right in front of his eyes. The Evil One was sitting on a broken crag directly ahead, looking accommodatingly Western European in his chosen form, replete with wings and horns and hooves- though Chamberlain later opined that the devil had very Indian-like facial features. Around his head a wreath of lightning gleamed, illuminating the scene around him. He was attended by various hideous wraiths, ghosts, imps of hell, etc, in a myriad of grotesque shapes.

A young, nude native girl was brought forth. Shrieking and fighting, she was slowly edged closer to the stone altar, upon which she was hurled viciously. The wizard danced around her for several minutes, finally raising his ceremonial axe for the ritual’s culmination. As the maiden looked away, her eyes locked with Chamberlain’s, who was so moved that he felt he had to intervene. Climbing up from his hiding place, he raised his Bible- which he happened to have one him- into the air, and in Biblically dramatic fashion, spake the great Name of God. A deafening boom of thunder sounded, lightning split the sky a thousand ways, and when it died off the whole mob had gone and he was alone in the darkness. When morning came, he was prepared to chalk up the experience to dreaming, if it were not for the disappearance of his deer.

Obviously, the story is not to be taken as a literal version of a real event. Even as an item of mythology, it lacks great dimension or meaning. The whole narrative is a bit too simple and convenient, the forces in conflict too black and white and the action slightly too camp; stylistically, it seems reminiscent of certain Bible stories, or of Lovecraft, as cranked out by Roger Corman.

Though my prevailing suspicion is that this incident is a fabrication, the more general rumors about the spot may reveal some actual truth about the culture of the Indians who lived here in the 17th and 18th centuries. Though the “crimson stains” in the Devil’s Altar are in fact iron ore deposits, and there is no evidence that any Native American group in this part of North America ever conducted any form of human sacrifice, it is likely that Wizard’s Glen was of some kind of ritual importance to the area’s natives. Hobbomocco, too, is a real Algonquin deity- and it seems to me that it is a clash between two different ways of looking at this figure that is behind the flavor and longevity of this local myth. In the basic Algonquin view of the cosmos, Hobbomocco (also known as Hobbamock, or Abbomacho) was associated with darkness and with night. His name is related to all Algonquin words for death and the dead. He is not directly analogous to the Christian Satan- God’s Accuser. In their worldview, Hobbomocco is not representative of any conflict with the god of nature and creation; rather, he is one side of nature, a sometimes dangerous source of visions and power, which shamans, or powwows, can gain through communing with.

The story of Wizard’s Glen that emerged as the final product of the friction between these two cultural ideas is one in which only a fractional nod to the subjective reality of the civilization on which it is based; emblematic of a social process in which the sensational aspect of the legend are promoted, while the context is devalued and discarded. That is one interpretation. The reader inclined to make a special trip to the Glen, surrounded by echoes while looking up at the spread of mystical rubble, is bound to come up with his or her own interpretation.

The Goshen Tunnel Enigma

The Advocate Weekly
Thursday, December 29
By Joe Durwin

As may be apparent, I like mysteries. Many of the local enigmas I've covered in this column offer little hope for ultimate resolution; often it is a question of belief - you believe in ghosts, and that a particular house is haunted, or you don't and it ain't. Some can't be scrutinized closely enough from afar: for instance, when some strange object whizzes across the sky, unless you're there to see it, who knows?

Some local mysteries are a little more accessible, built into the landscape itself. Their existence is plain as day, their idiosyncrasy unimpeachable. This is especially true in the case of the stone tunnels dug into the earth in Goshen.

The casual observer, coming across the simple stone shaft not far from the cemetery might not think too much of it at first. One might easily surmise that this hole, 15 feet deep and about 3 1/2 feet in diameter, once served as a well. However, near the bottom, this "well" opens onto two more stone-lined shafts protruding out in each direction. The lower tunnel runs west and is narrower and appears to have been meant as a drain to keep the main shaft from filling up with water. It is capped off by flagstones about 70 feet from its mouth. Above it, a slightly wider tunnel measuring 2 by 2 1/2 feet - just large enough to accommodate a crawling adult - runs east about 15 feet toward the cemetery. It is believed that this upper shaft once opened onto a chamber of about 10 square feet, but this caved in long ago.

People have been wondering about these stone tunnels for a long time. Tradition has it that the tunnels were discovered in the early 1800s by two boys who chased a rabbit into its burrow, and in the process of trying to dig it out, they dislodged the flagstone covering the main shaft, which had been buried under sod and bushes. The construction is sometimes called the "Counterfeiter's Den," in keeping with a local legend that they are part of a vast network of tunnels that ran to a hideout under the cemetery used by a savage gang. Some say that the hideout was dynamited and that the ghosts of the gang still haunt the cemetery. Another variation of the legend has it that they were really grave-robbers, not counterfeiters. The truth is, there's really no evidence to connect any criminal gang with the Goshen tunnels, and their discovery took place before the cemetery was laid.

The "Hampshire History" speculates that the structure might have been a shelter from Indian raids. The only problem with that theory is that Goshen, first settled in 1761, was never in any danger of having to worry about such raids.

The sheer time and effort required to quarry and place the flagstones with which the entire complex is lined more-or-less precludes the possibility that anyone could have constructed it in the last two centuries without some historical record existing to describe who built it or why. The very fact that there is no definitive answer to these questions argues strongly for a pre-colonial origin.

It may be that the structure was built by some Native American culture that moved on from these parts long before any white people arrived. If so, it must have served some important function, for so much work to have been put into something so difficult to traverse. It is also likely that that it was not a solitary effort. Archaeologist Salvatore Trento suggests that the tunnels "in all probability, are part of a larger complex of underground constructions yet to be found in the meadows surrounding the Mill River."

Some scholars see similarities between Goshen's underground lair and a stone tunnel in Upton, and with hundreds of other ancient sites around New England - such as Salem, N.H.'s "Mystery Hill," a.k.a. "America's Stonehenge." Many of these sites have been put forth as possible examples of exploration by Vikings, Celts or other visiting cultures that left no other record of their stay. Signs of human presence at Mystery Hill date back possibly as far as 2000 B.C., and at least one source has stated that the samples of soil from around the tunnel indicated that it too might have been dug thousands of years ago. I haven't been able to substantiate this last, so at the present time the age and purpose of the complex remains as much an enigma as ever.

I find myself very curious about the ancient people who might have been here. Were they building a hideout from enemies? A place to store precious treasures? Did it have some ritual significance, as with certain similar prehistoric tunnels found in Scotland and elsewhere? I can't help but wonder what went through their minds as they dug holes into these hills, unaware of the tantalizing mystery they were leaving behind for later inhabitants.

--
Joe Durwin is a Pittsfield native on extended sabbatical in the desert. Send him accounts of unexplained experiences, strange tales or haunted places at joe@durwin.net.

The Fernbrook Phantom

Fernbrook- early 20th century (courtesy of Gray Locke>



Lenox, Massachusetts is well known for the many mansions built there by wealthy citizens during the Gilded Age. Given their history and square footage, it is perhaps not surprising that there are stories of ghostly residents attached to several of them.

One such residence is to be found in the building now known as High Point on West Mountain Road, currently in use as one of the Hillcrest Educational Center sites. Though much smaller than many of the Gilded Age "cottages," it has nonetheless afforded plenty of space for mysterious happenings.

Originally known as Fernbrook, this house was constructed between 1901 and 1902, as a residence and studio for Thomas Shields Clarke. Clarke was an aristocrat, and a painter and sculptor of some considerable renown, who had exhibited and won awards in Berlin, Paris, London and Madrid. His work was much in demand at that time, and some of his larger bronze and marble works adorn public places in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and other cities.

The cottage itself was designed by Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre, in the style of a Tyrolean Gothic villa. It was built to contain a spacious studio, modeled after the refectory of a monastery in Sicily, as well as an elaborate library, 13 bedrooms, three baths and six fireplaces. After Clarke died in 1920, the estate was sold to Dr. Robert Metz, who later passed it on to Paul Schmidinger.

Fernbrook has been mentioned for years in a number of "Haunted Places" reference books, accompanied by extremely brief entries. I have never seen more than a sentence or two devoted to it in print, typically just some vague mention of strange noises heard in the house. Fortunately, Robert Gorden of Becket, who worked there for a number of years, was able to shed a great deal more light on its ghoulish history for me.

Fernbrook circa 1920 rear of house.


Gorden revealed that talk of a ghost went back several decades, to around the time Dr. Metz acquired the property, and perhaps even earlier. Over the years, quite a few people had discussed hearing and seeing strange things around the house. Most of the strangest, according to Gorden, seemed to be localized around the area of the basement. Doors that had been left firmly shut would spring open, and from his workshop there he could hear a sound like someone moaning or crying.

"Sometimes I would come around a corner and have the sense that someone or something had just turned the corner ahead of me, or gone through the door," he said. "I don't think I actually 'saw' anything but I often felt that I did, or had just missed someone."

Another employee, a housekeeper there, also had a variety of strange experiences. Her room was also in the basement, beside what had been the original laundry area, and from there she could plainly hear a woman's cries. Doors would slam suddenly and cold drafts would rise up, apparently out of nowhere. On one particularly frightening occasion, she said, she had even seen an apparition of woman pass by, covered all in white.

Curious about the phenomenon, Gorden mentioned it to Paul Schmidinger, who had first come there to work for Dr. Metz in 1937. Metz had said that he'd been told by past servants at the house that Clarke had had an affair with a Welsh girl named Anghorad, who served as the under-house parlor maid. At some point, the girl became pregnant and months later she died. Her body was found in the laundry room, having perished either from a miscarriage or botched abortion attempt, according to rumor.

This story intrigued me, and I wondered whether there might be any historical documentation that might help confirm this sequence of events. There is not a huge amount of information available about Clarke's time in Lenox. What is known is that he stayed at Fernbrook, from May to October, every year from 1904 to 1920. As for the girl, a check of the town's death records for those years failed to turn up mention of anyone listed by that name. The historical record is incomplete, and it is probably safe to say that this was the sort of thing the aristocratic Clarke would not have wanted widely known.

In the end, though, it's pure speculation, and hardly the sort of thing to hang a man's reputation on. Maybe there was no Anghorad; maybe something completely different happened. It could be that the story simply grew more sordid as it was passed around by the house staff. In any case, it makes a compelling narrative, which, as far it goes, helps to explain reports of unusual experiences there over the years.

High Point circa 1990 (courtesy of Gray Locke)


The house changed hands more rapidly after Metz died in the late '40s. Schmidinger sold it in 1956 to Florence Davis, who resold it soon after. Doris Barden turned it into "High Point Art Gallery and Inn," which operated for a few years, before the cottage came to its current use in the 1970s. I've been unable to obtain any information from anyone at Hillcrest regarding the house or its reputation, so I've no idea whether or not any strange occurrences ever come up. Perhaps whatever unpleasantness hung over the place has faded away - or perhaps doors still open, unseen, in the basement.

Curious Canine Encounters

Last week I wrote on the subject of "The Thing," a generic label given to describe any of a number of elusive and unidentified panther-like cats seen popping up sporadically hereabouts.

To be fair, I feel I should mention that dogs, as well as cats, have rained across the scope of my mystery radar. In the interest of equality between these two four-legged mammal families that have ever-vied for the top spots in humankind's affection, I shall take this opportunity to follow-up with a summary of some curious canine encounters.

Like the cougar, the continued existence of the wolf in this area has occasionally been a matter of contention. Like other large fauna, their numbers were not very great in the Berkshires during the early years of European settlement. As Williams College professor Chester Dewey pointed out in an 1829 tract, wolves - like deer and bears - had essentially disappeared from the area by that time. These other two groups have, of course, bounced back since then - the latter even becoming a little too ubiquitous for the taste of some in recent years. By contrast, the last verified wolf kill in this county took place in 1827, but there is some reason to speculate that this may not have been the final chapter in the story. In 1903, for instance, a Hancock man named William Hatch claimed to have shot a 100-pound timber wolf on Potter Mountain, and a similar assertion was made by a man in New Marlboro in 1918. In 1923, an entire pack of wolves was seen repeatedly along the southern rim of the county, in Mount Washington, Sheffield, New Marlborough and Otis. These sightings made headlines as far away as Iowa. Some suggested that they might have made their way down from Canada, driven south by the particularly bad winter that year. Others dismissed it as some kind of mass hysteria - the same explanation offered by skeptics of "The Thing" 20 years later.

Then there were the "mystery dogs" that plagued Stockbridge and the surrounding area in the spring of 1950. This pair of wild canines menaced the countryside for several weeks, killing at least one sheep, a dog and a score of poultry. Positive identification was never made, and it remains a mystery whether these were wolves, so-called "coy-dogs" (coy-wolves being a more accurate label for this hybrid) or some other kind of creature entirely.

The strangest encounter with a crypto-canine that I have come across, though, dates back to just a few years ago, to the 1990s. A former Pittsfield man who wishes to remain anonymous relays the following (excerpted) story:

"It was sometime around near the end of my senior year [of high school] and my friend Kevin [real name omitted] and I were driving around in his car one night. We were bored and driving around like, random places, random roads and whatnot, just for something to do..

"I'm not exactly sure where we were when this happened. somewhere off around the north side of Kirchner Road as you head to Washington [from Pittsfield] and we were driving down this dirt back road way out there and we came to a place where the road became really narrow, like hardly even a road.. And we kinda slowed all the way down, debating whether we should turn around or whatever. and all of sudden this huge black dog comes running at us out of nowhere howling and barking and freaking out.. It scared the *#@! out of us, and Kevin hit the gas and we started hauling down the road, going really fast.

"The dog just started running alongside the car right next to my window. it just stayed right next to us howling and barking.. We were going really fast by this, like 35 or 40 and it stayed right there, right alongside us.. I was too freaked out to look at it, just this big black thing.really dark black. next to the car. It kept on us for like a really long-time - then it was just gone. One second it was right outside my passenger side window and then it was just nowhere around. It was just so weird."

To my folklore-jaded ears, the animal described in this account sounds like no ordinary black dog, but a bona fide "Black Dog." The Black Dog, like the panther discussed in last week's column, is a creature whose purported attributes place it more in the speculative world of the paranormal than in the context of a purely biological animal not yet acknowledged by science. It is fundamentally nocturnal, and more apparitional in nature than a flesh-and-blood creature. It tends to be seen in certain locations repeatedly, and its behavior suggests an aura of premeditation, even foreboding. According to George Eberhart's two-volume encyclopedia "Mysterious Creatures," it is usually seen on rural back roads and "country lanes," and it is frequently described as being able to appear and disappear at will.

The earliest print reference to this creature is in a French manuscript dating back to 856 A.D. Accounts of Black Dogs are especially common in Britain, where it has been sporadically seen for centuries and helped to inspire the Sherlock Holmes classic "The Hound of the Baskervilles." Reports have also come in from various spots around North America; however, the only other description of a (possible) Black Dog in the Berkshires was in 1944, when the Eagle reported on what it called a "disappearing dog mystery."

For several weeks, Pittsfield residents along upper North Street reported nightly barking, always around midnight, from an unseen dog. House-to-house checks were made and a systematic search of the woods was conducted, but no sign of the culprit was ever found.

It may be that this area receives occasional visits from Black Dogs wandering up from Connecticut, where such lore has existed for more than a century. In particular, one such ghoulish hound is said to chronically haunt West Peak. In this area, tradition says that "if a man shall meet the Black Dog once it shall be for joy; and if twice it shall be for sorrow; and the third time, he shall die."

A 1938 history of Connecticut reinforces this tradition, pointing out six mysterious deaths where, in each case, the victim had previously claimed to have seen the Black Dog twice. The Meriden Historical Society has records of other deaths attributed to this hellhound. Now surely West Peak is a safe enough distance to shelter us from the marauding of such doom-harbingers, but reports have also cropped up on occasion in Hartford and Litchfield counties, enough to raise the eyebrow of this semi-superstitious chronicler. So with regards to my informant, and to any other area residents who should happen upon such a mysterious whelp on some back road, I sincerely hope it just the once.

Mystery Cats Keep on Prowling

Local papers called it “The Thing” – but this was no science fiction monster out of a John Carpenter remake. It was a flesh-and-blood animal, and frequent sightings of it roaming the woods caused quite a stir here in the 1940’s. People began talking about it in the fall of 1945, when a Pittsfield woman walking her dogs on Holmes Road, near the Country Club, spotted a creature she couldn’t identify. It frightened her and her dogs, and she later remarked on the incident to someone at the Berkshire Museum.

The Thing reappeared in early January, when Mr. and Mrs. Holden observed it for about a half hour as it prowled the edge of a piece of woodland adjacent to their Holmes Road property. Their description, of a fawn-colored animal about five feet long, with a long tail, matched that of a panther. Their account piqued the curiosity of Berkshire Museum curator Bartlett Hendricks. No arm-chair analyst, Hendricks headed out to the Holden property the day after their story appeared in the Eagle to investigate some tracks left in the snow. The tracks had been obscured by a light drifting of snow the night before, and definite identification was not possible, though they seemed to be of feline origin. Hendricks said that based on the Holdens’ description, the animal could not have been a bobcat because of its long tail, but that it might have been a small panther.

The panther, also known by the names cougar, puma, painter, mountain lion, or catamount (Puma concolor, in current scientific parlance) has long presented a conundrum for naturalists in the Northeast. These felines were hunted aggressively in the first centuries of European settlement, and were considered to be officially extinct in the eastern United States and Canada as of the late 1800s. However, it seems that the cougars themselves may have missed the memo, as they have continued to be spotted in this region on a more-or-less regular basis since then. For instance, though the last Vermont catamount was supposedly bagged in Barnard in 1881 (its stuffed corpse is still on display at the Historical Society in Montpelier), at least a dozen people reported spotting one on Glastenbury Mountain throughout the summer of 1901. One spooked a man in Williamstown in 1899, and yet another was pursued by a hunter in North Pownal in 1926. These are just a smattering of such examples.

For whatever reason, 1946 saw the beginning of a major wave of interest in such encounters locally. A month or so after a series of sightings on Holmes Road, another man spotted The Thing in a tree on lower South Street. In Williamstown, a pair of childhood sweethearts was chased by another cougar- and it must have been one hell of a chase, for they decided to get married promptly after. The Museum sent sketches of the tracks that had been seen, along with samples of hair believed to belong to the mystery animal, to the Museum of Natural History in New York. The zoologist who answered said that the tracks drawn were indeed consistent with those of a mountain lion, but the hair could not be identified with the limited technology of the day.

Interest in The Thing waned slightly for a year or so after that, until it popped up in Dalton in the summer of 1948. The Mather family twice saw it cross their garden on North Street, and Mrs. Harold Olds saw it behind her barn a little ways down the same street. She described it as a “black beast” that frightened her so badly that she could not remember much else about it. This new version of The Thing was seen several times thereafter in Hinsdale, skulking about in the vicinity of Plunkett Lake, and it was blamed for the slaying of a cow in Peru. These 1948 sightings tended to reiterate Mrs. Olds’ description of a “black beast,” which is quite curious.

While the presence of surviving panther populations in the east is still debated, everyone at least acknowledges that such animals did exist -and still do in the west, as well as a few left in Florida. A black panther, on the other hand, has never been proven to exist. What are usually thought of generically as a “black panther” are in fact certain melanistic leopards, native to Africa and Asia. The incidence of melanism in the puma species has never been demonstrated scientifically. A specimen of one such black panther was said to have been killed in Brazil in 1843, but this report was not confirmed, and this may actually have been a jaguar. The trait of melanism tends to run highest among wild felines living in the tropics or sub-tropics, so the presence of such a creature in North America would be remarkable. Nonetheless, sightings of black panthers have occurred, in fairly high numbers, throughout the U.S. and Canada.

New Brunswick biologist Bruce S. Wright looked at reports of black panthers in the 1950s, in the most in-depth study of the Eastern Panther done to date. He first attempted to explain away the impression of their dark coloration in a number of novel ways, but eventually came to conclude that some melanistic individuals do exist, albeit in small numbers. Making matters even more complicated, though, is the fact that black panther reports often are decidedly weirder than those of their tawny brethren, featuring unusual attributes such as highly aggressive behavior and a fascination with automobiles (some have even attacked cars, if the reports in question are reliable). This, in addition to the fact that such sightings come not only from the western hemisphere, but from such places as the U.K. and Australia, where panthers have never been native, has conferred a certain legendary, even paranormal, connotation to these elusive creatures. They have been referred to on occasion as “the UFOs of the cat world.”

Sightings of panthers, of both the standard and black varieties, have continued sporadically in this area ever since. Encounters throughout New England have increased dramatically over the last couple of decades, to the point where there can’t be very much doubt that there are some cougars lurking in the Northeastern forests. Whether they are groups which have migrated back from the West, descendants of escaped or released “pets,” or, perhaps most logically, representatives of an eastern subspecies declared extinct far too prematurely, is a question which remains to be kicked around. One thing seems certain: these “Things” seem to like it here tolerably well, and I for one hope that they keep making appearances.

Weirdest Week Ever

We all have weird days. Sometimes - perhaps more often than not - these days cluster together and we find ourselves looking back at a whole week that just seems odd. In the final few days of October 1908, this whole region had a week like that. It was, in fact, possibly the strangest week ever seen in these parts. Mind you, no one event that week was, in and of itself, too completely bizarre or unheard of. It was rather a combination of more-or-less unrelated curiosities, grouped so closely together in time as to raise an eyebrow - namely my own. Piecing the events of that week together from newspapers, it isn't apparent whether or not anyone at the time noticed or remarked on this convergence of odd and interesting happenings, but looking back it in hindsight, it certainly seems to me that there was something strange in the air that week.

To start things off, October 20, 1908, was being called "the day of the big smoke" by newspapers all over Massachusetts, as a string of disastrous fires raged across the Berkshires and southern Vermont. A thick pall hung over the area, blotting out the sun. Fires on Bald Mountain and Mount Anthony charred hundreds of acres of forest, while blazes around Lee damaged large tracts of land and threatened to engulf what is now October Mountain State Forest. The peak of Hoosac Mountain was described as nothing but a "mass of flames." These and other spontaneous fires, igniting in brush and dry leaves and spreading quickly, would continue for days to come, and would serve as a dramatic backdrop for the curious incidents that followed.

While firefighters and volunteer workers were busy combating constant fires, the police were also very busy. On the 21st, an unidentified body was discovered by two men on a farm in New Ashford. The badly decomposed body was found under a pile of leaves, along with an overcoat. Authorities were at a loss to explain it, as no one in the vicinity was thought to be missing.

The following day, William Van Sleet and Dr. Sidney Stowell braved the still somewhat smoky skies, setting out in "Heart of the Berkshires," the record-setting balloon of the Pittsfield Aero Club. Their flight took them west to New York, where they were at first mistaken for the "man in the moon" by a Cohoes man who heard them shouting down to him. According to one long-time UFO researcher, Van Sleet's balloon may actually have been sharing the sky with a real space man. Joseph Trainor, editor of UFO Roundup, believes that another object, a "mystery" balloon may have followed a similar route and been witnessed by Luke Minihan and other members of the Aero Club who were attempting to keep tabs on the balloon. The case he makes is flimsy, however, and based primarily on the fact that, unbeknownst to them, the Van Sleet flight got off to a slow start and would not have caught up with the departed automobile. But the front page Eagle story on their flight does not state what time Minihan and his group first spotted the balloon overhead, and furthermore it is unlikely that they would mistake some other "mystery airship" with their own balloon, hazy skies or no.

Meanwhile, Pittsfield police apprehended "a very queer stranger," as the Eagle put it. The man, who was picked up while attempting to sell a bicycle that the arresting officer believed to be stolen, gave his name as William Allen. He had an inch-deep dent in the side of his head, where he said he had been kicked by a horse. He appeared to have amnesia and could not tell the police much of anything else about himself. When asked where he was from, he gestured vaguely, saying "up there." The last thing he remembered, he said, was riding his bicycle in Schenectady the previous Sunday, and everything after that was a blank. This was no returned abductee from Trainor's supposed spaceship - though the truth, when it finally came out two days later, was nearly as sensational. The mysterious "William Allen" was in fact Elroy Kent, a fearsome lunatic who had escaped from Waterbury Asylum in Vermont the previous summer, and soon after had murdered a woman in Wallingford. His arrest made headlines throughout the northeast.

Fires continued to be fought throughout the area: two in Becket were put out just as one broke out in Washington. Blazes also popped up at Greylock, at Florida Mountain, and in North Adams. On the 23rd, a barn burned down in West Pittsfield, and another wreaked havoc on a number of buildings on the north side of Columbus Ave. - my great-grand uncle, William Durwin, helped extinguish the blazes, managing to save all the horses in a barn there. The situation was even worse in Vermont, where continued flames threatened to destroy much of Woodford and Glastenbury. The Bennington Banner stated that the prevailing opinion there was that the fires were being set intentionally.

These ubiquitous conflagrations seemed to have the effect of smoking out curious characters. On the 24th, two different vagrants, both of whom were blind, were picked up in Pittsfield. Not only did they share a disability, but they apparently shared the same name. Though held and questioned separately, they both gave their identity as Charles Wilson. Three days later, a mysterious hermit was stopped near the Congregational Church on South Street. The man said that he this was the first time he had been out Hinsdale in more than 40 years and was wandering around lost. He did not give his name, and after being given directions to a place on North Street, took off and was not seen again.

Certain criminal tendencies were also brought out in the chaotic mix. The Dalton home of U.S. Senator W. Murray Crane was robbed of over $800 in silver. On the 26th, a West Pittsfield man who had just returned from three weeks in Springfield, shot at an unidentified man on West Street, then took his own life, managing to fire two shots into his own head. That same day saw a record crowd in the Pittsfield courthouse, with 24 defendants arraigned on criminal charges.

Then rain came, as it always does in the end, and the infernal flames that swept the hillsides died away. Elroy Kent was extradited to Vermont to stand trial for his crimes (the Elroy family, it is worth mentioning, was full of bad apples - the following summer, Elroy's brother Fred was arrested for the murder of their father), and while it doesn't appear that the issue of the body found in New Ashford was ever fully resolved, things seemed to return to normality. Or, at least, to a state as approximate to normal as things ever do get.

When Wild Men Roamed the Woods

In the news-speak of earlier days, the term "wild man" was used fairly frequently, and often quite vaguely. I come across it regularly in my perusal of American newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries, and I have been surprised and perplexed by the variety of categories it is used to cover.

In earlier and less sensitive eras, the term was used more or less interchangeably to refer to any two-legged being that presented any connotation of mystery to the average citizen. On some occasions, the "wild man" label is applied to sightings of hairy, ape-like forest denizens - such as one reported near Williamstown in 1879 - who sound suspiciously like what we now think of collectively as "Bigfoot." Sometimes it was simply an ethnocentric way of referring to anyone of Native American origin. It was also used as a blanket brand applied to any kind of hermit or forest-dwelling man about whom little was known. It is on cases of this final type that I will focus my attention this week.

This type of "wild man" included men from a variety of different backgrounds. Some were destitute and unable to find work, mentally ill, heartbroken or criminals on the lamb. Some were simply taciturn old men who preferred the seclusion of caves and wooded hill-country to the company of others and the trappings of society. All were wanderers and loners who lived outside both the tangible and abstract boundaries of civilization, and as such they were figures of mystery and intrigue.

The first recorded "wild man" in this area of which I am aware is a curious character who roamed the woods around Bennington, Vt., in the spring of 1867. For several weeks he was reported seen often around the outskirts of town, usually up to no good. It was said that during the day he holed up in a lair he had staked out in the forest, roaming around only at night. He had a nasty habit of following women walking around town, and of peeking in the windows of houses. He had also, it was rumored, exposed himself on the few occasions when someone accidentally came across his wooded hiding place. It was thought that he was some kind of escaped lunatic, and the entire town appeared to be terrified of him. The wild man kept three pistols in his belt and carried with him a menacing looking dagger, and he was described as being very ugly to look at. The Bennington Banner spoke of the situation in a very dramatic way, saying that "a reign of terror has been inaugurated among our female population," and that "authorities should at once take measures to hunt out the fellow." Hunt him out they did. A posse confronted him at his "lair," and sent him packing.

If an old article in the Fitchburg Daily Sentinel is to be believed, an even stranger character took up residence in the Berkshires in 1899. Squire N.L. Harris discovered the bizarre stranger living in a hillside cave at Mount Washington, after noticing smoke pouring out from it. The Sentinel called him "the strangest bit of humanity seen hereabouts," describing a withered man no more than 4 feet tall, covered in hair and dressed in rags. He had apparently been living on the flesh of birds, lizards and whatever else he could catch manually; the mouth of the cave was littered with small bones and feathers. When Harris finally confronted the man to find out who he was, it became apparent that the man spoke only in some unfamiliar language. Nonetheless, the Squire managed to deduce, by some means not explained, that the "cave man" hailed from somewhere in South America.

The most famous wild man to ever traverse the wilder portions of the Berkshires was the "Old Leather Man." Old Leather Man was a wandering recluse who for more than 20 years walked a circuitous route from western Connecticut to eastern New York with forays into Berkshire County, and possibly even as far north as Canada on occasion. A quiet man of obvious French origins, he wore an outfit comprised completely of roughly-sewn leather patches. In the first few years after he appeared in Connecticut in the early 1860s, he was an object of fear and suspicion. Mothers would even discipline their unruly children with the threat that "old Leathery" would come for them if they did not behave. As time passed, though, he became a celebrated eccentric. People would run to the road when he was making his way through town to get a glimpse of him, or to bring him food or tobacco. His passage and the mystery of his identity were subjects of intrigue and debate, and over the years he became a legend throughout the northeast, occasionally making headlines in newspapers as far away as California.

Some believe his name was Jules Bourglay, a Frenchman who came to the United States after losing his fortune in the leather business, and along with it his chances to marry the woman he loved. This back-story, however, has been exposed as a newspaper hoax. According to Connecticut historian and Leather Man researcher Dan W. Deluca, this fictional account of his origins was first presented in the Waterbury Daily American, a few years before his death. The story was later retracted, but by then the yarn had been picked up by so many other papers that it was difficult to dislodge. His true identity remains a mystery to this day. What is known for sure is that he passed away in Mount Pleasant, N.Y., in 1889, where his headstone bears the fictional moniker. His story - both the real and fictional parts - have inspired a number of depictions since, such as the song "Leatherman" by the rock band Pearl Jam.

The last reported "wild man" in these parts seems to have been in 1942, when Pittsfield residents began complaining of a strange man living in the woods near Pontoosuc Lake. Rumors of a man dressed only in a blanket and carrying a knife circulated throughout the fall. There were reports of houses broken into, and theft of food and various other items. The mystery was laid bare in late November when a state police officer spotted the man, and, after a brief scuffle, arrested him. Upon examination, it became clear that the "wild man" was a young Pittsfield man who had gone AWOL from the army base in Falmouth.

So ended the age of the "wild man," at least in this region. These men, and the reactions they drew from those living in the "civilized" world which they skirted, are an interesting slice of history. They were characters whose lives were shrouded in mystery; because of that, most elicited fear, especially in small communities where people knew a lot about their neighbors. Some, like Old Leather Man, became local legends. Today we would most likely say that such people had "slipped through the cracks" - and, while such cracks still exist, perhaps the fact that we at least acknowledge the presence of cracks in society is progress, of a sort.

Delving into the Hoosac Tunnel Part II

Advocate Weekly
Thursday, October 27
By Joe Durwin


In last week's column, I explored some of the early history of the Hoosac Tunnel, including the tragic deaths involved in its construction and the first rumors of ghostly encounters in this massive five-mile mountain passage. After all the blood, tears and virtual mountains of money, the tunnel was finally completed in the mid-1870s. It became an important part of railroad travel in the region, but it also continued to be a place of tragedy, where mysteries abounded like cloistered smoke in the dark hole in the hills.

In 1874, three months before the first train passed through, a local hunter named Frank Webster went missing in the vicinity the dark passageway. When searchers found him three days later, he was in a traumatized condition and said that voices had ordered him into the tunnel. While wandering inside, he was accosted by horrible apparitions who ripped his rifle from his hands and beat him over the head with it, after which he could remember nothing more. The following fall, a fire-tender named Harlan Mulvaney was delivering a wagon load of firewood into the tunnel when he went missing. The horses and wagon were found in the woods soon after, but Mulvaney was never located. I have not yet been able to find any contemporary documentation of these two incidents, so I must admit I do not know how much of the story surrounding these disappearances can be chalked up to legend.

I do know that the chain of brutal fatalities taking place in the tunnel continued for decades after. Most researchers have focused on the nearly two hundred killed during the construction, but I personally have collected records of more than three dozen deadly incidents after 1875, and this seems to be only the tip of the iceberg. In 1876, a worker named William Richards fell while working at the ill-omened central shaft. A few years later, a circus tent man named Sam Caesar was killed when he fell from the top of a train and slipped between the cars, being crushed instantly.

Many of the accidents were caused by the low visibility in the tunnel. Prior to the line being changed over to electric, poor ventilation caused the tunnel to fill up with smoke, making it almost impossible to see clearly. This led many railroad workers being struck by oncoming trains, as well as frequent collisions of trains with one another. These disastrous crashes included one in 1894, in which two men lost their lives, and one in 1912, where four men lost their lives. This latter was so bad that the wreckage burned unchecked for many hours and the tunnel remained blocked for several days. A particularly bad weekend came in November of 1901, which saw three incidents in rapid succession. During the afternoon of November 23, a passenger train collided with a freight train that had been stopped on the east-bound track. Several cars were destroyed but no one was seriously injured. Four hours later, a worker was struck and killed while heading back from the wreckage on the east track. Because of the noise involved in the clean up there, he did not hear the train that came barreling down the west-bound track. The following day, a worker by the name of Michael Powers died when he was overcome by the acrid coal gas that, while a constant problem, had been worse that day because of malfunctions in the fan system of the central shaft.

Not all of the causes of death in the tunnel were as cut-and-dry. In 1912, a section foreman named Andrew Cullen killed himself in the tunnel after "suddenly becoming insane" and killing two of his crew. There had been no quarrel between the men and no reason for his rampage was ever proffered. Another suicide had been attempted there by a woman 17 years earlier. The attempt failed, but no reason was identified for that act either.

Another death shrouded in mystery was the 1935 electrocution of a young man while riding a freight train through the dark passage. The body was identified as Albert Debruycker by his mother, and was buried in North Adams. Matters were complicated 12 years later, however, when Debruycker turned out to be alive and well, living in California. To this day the identity of the body buried under his name in Southview Cemetery remains unknown.

Given the legacy of tragedy and mystery surrounding the tunnel, its reputation as one of the most haunted places in New England should come as no surprise. There are numerous first-hand accounts of inexplicable occurrences witnessed there, stretching back for well over a century. One of the first documented complaints of this kind can be found in letters written by Paul Travers, a mechanical engineer, and Dr. Clifford Owens, a friend of one of the tunnel foreman. In September of 1868, Travers reported that he and another worker had heard "what truly sounded like a man groaning out in pain. Yet, when we turned up the wicks on our lamps, there were no other human beings in the shaft." Four years later, Owens reported hearing a similar moaning sound. This was followed by a blue light, which, as it approached them, appeared to be the form of a headless human being.

Then there is an account from Joseph Impoco, who worked in the tunnel in the 1920s. Impoco claimed that ghosts had saved his life on two occasions by shouting warnings to him: when a train was about to mow him down and when he was nearly electrocuted. In 1984, Ali Allmaker wrote an account of the tunnel's eerie atmosphere. Mistakenly referred to as female in all recent accounts, Mr. Allmaker was a philosophy professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts with a part-time interest in hunting ghosts. He described how he accompanied a railroad employee on a tour of the Hoosac and throughout felt the sensation that someone was following close behind him. He also mentioned that some North Adams students had left a tape recorder in the tunnel overnight, and when they retrieved it strange, muffled voices could be heard. Some sources also cite the 1976 report from an Agawam parapsychologist, of seeing the clear form of a ghost in old-fashioned clothing eating his lunch in front of her, but this account originated with a tabloid story by The Star and appears to have been fabricated.

Stories of phantom workers, floating blue lights and strange voices in the long dark abyss of the tunnel continue to this day. There are even wild accounts of a bricked-up room where "unspeakable horrors" are hidden. Though it is still actively used by freight trains, a handful of people every year brave the dark, unpleasant and potentially dangerous 5-mile hike. Anyone endeavoring to attempt this trip, though, should first have a good long think on the fate that has befallen many others while passing through Berkshire County's "Forbidden Mountain."

Happy Halloween.

Primary Sources:


Berkshire Evening Eagle: Aug 9, 1943; Aug 14, 1943; Jan 14, 1946; Apr 2, 1947; June 27, 1959; Sep. 2, 1959;

North Adams Transcript: June 7, 1895; July 14, 1898; Sep. 24, 1900; Jan 11, 1901; Nov. 25, 1901; Nov. 11, 1902

Fitchburg Daily Sentinel: Feb 16, 1873; May 22, 1906; Oct 4, 1935; March 17, 1942;

NY Times: Oct 21-22, 1867; July 1, 1879;

Arizona Republican: Aug 6, 1893
Daily Democrat (MO): Oct 6, 1873,
Indianapolis Star: Feb 21, 1912
Daily Kennebec Journal: Feb 5, 1912
Davenport Daily Leader Sep. 10, 1894


Kuperschmid, Eileen. “Do 192 ghosts walk these tracks?” Berkshire Sampler, Oct 30, 1977

Byron, Carl. (1974) A Pinprick of light: The Troy & Greenfield Railroad and Its Hoosac Tunnel
Norman, Michael; Scott, Beth. (1995) Historic Haunted America


On the web:
http://www.boudillion.com/hoosac/hoosac.htm
http://www.prairieghosts.com/hoosac.html

Exploring the Hoosac Tunel - PART I

Advocate Weekly

In an honor of the approaching Halloween holiday, I have decided to dedicate two installments of "These Mysterious Hills" to what is surely the most thoroughly haunted location in all the Berkshires: the Hoosac Tunnel.

The second longest railroad tunnel in North America, the Hoosac has a long history about which much has been written. This history is a saga of will and human engineering - it is also the tale of politics, economics and terrible tragedy. From among these historical threads arises an additional narrative, that of supernatural occurrence and ghostly goings-on, and it is in this area that my own expertise lies.

To understand the tunnel's dark reputation, it is crucial that the history of its construction be examined. Hoosac Mountain, the imposing mass of rock through which the tunnel cuts a path, was formed along with the rest of the Berkshire Hills hundreds of millions of years ago, through a series of geological processes known as the Taconic Orogeny. Five miles wide at its base, the mountain is composed mainly of limestone, slate and mica, with tough gneiss throughout its center. Many sources maintain that Native Americans referred to it as Forbidden Mountain, implying that the land was already regarded as cursed long before the tunnel. In actuality, the Mahican words from which "Hoosac" is derived translate to something like "Mountain Rock." The label "forbidden" was placed on it by early colonial settlers, possibly because of the obstacle it posed to travel. Removing this obstacle proved to be no mean feat.

The creation of a tunnel through the mountain was first proposed in 1819, but the task seemed too daunting at a time when railroads were still fairly new to the country. The plan was later resurrected as part of the Troy and Greenfield Railroad, and construction began in 1851. It was first thought that the project could be completed in as little as five years, but, as with the estimates of its cost, this proved hopelessly optimistic. An expensive, 70-ton boring machine was brought in to begin cutting through the mountain, but the machine quit after only 10 feet. A 1906 article in the "Fitchburg Daily Sentinel" tells of a legend that the inventor of this machine went insane because of its failure, and that his ghost went on to haunt the cave where this false start was made. However, its inventor, John Wilkinson (given as Wilson in some sources) died decades before the tunnel was begun. While it is therefore doubtful that his ghost is to be found among the revenants reported in the tunnel, the failure of another of his machines in 1857 helped to bankrupt Chief Engineer Herman Haupt, so it is always possible his ghost may have been holding a grudge.

While the financial burden of the project was extreme, exceeding $20 million by the time of completion, it pales beside the immense cost in human terms. Between 192 and 195 lives were lost in the process of cutting the nearly 5-mile hole through the Earth, and the manner of these deaths was usually quite horrific. Causes included suffocation by toxic gas, being crushed by falling rock or blown apart by explosions. This latter was particularly common, owing to the introduction of nitroglycerine as the preferred explosive in 1867. While its safety was championed by George Mowbray, who manufactured it at a factory built near the tunnel's western portal in North Adams, the statistics belied this. In fact, Mowbray's own foreman, John Velsor, was "blown to atoms" - as newspapers at the time put it - when at least 800 pounds of the deadly soup went off in December 1870. Not a single trace of the man's body could be recovered from the site of the blast.

Even before nitroglycerine entered the picture, there were a number of casualties from explosive charges. One infamous occasion was in March of 1865. Two workers, Ned Brinkman and Billy Nash, were killed when a black powder charge was exploded prematurely by a third worker named Ringo Kelley. Kelley disappeared soon after and there were whispers that Nash and Brinkman's deaths may not have been accidental. Then, a little over a year later, Kelley's body was found in the tunnel, apparently strangled. No culprit was found and some workers came to believe that the ghosts of the men he had killed were responsible. Some even refused to return to work at the site.

Meanwhile, the litany of death continued. Many of the worst incidents took place in or around the central shaft - which ran 1,028 feet deep, used for ventilation and to speed up the tunneling - and it is believed by some to be the most haunted part of the tunnel. A Welsh worker named Griffin Jones took a wrong turn and fell the entire length of the shaft. When his body was found, it had been flattened so badly that it was "rolled up like a side of leather" to be taken to the funeral home. Another worker was killed when a drill fell over 300 feet, impaling him. But the worst accident there took place in October 1867. A candle ignited volatile naptha gas in the hoist-house at the top of the shaft, sending the burning building crashing down on 13 men who were working below. The pumps were also destroyed and water flooded the shaft. A brave miner named Mallery volunteered to be lowered down on a rope to look for survivors, but saw only water and burnt timber. Overcome by fumes, he was hauled up, whereupon he gasped, "No hope."

Following that tragedy, ghost stories proliferated, with frequent accounts from workers of apparitions and disembodied voices around the area of the shaft. A year after the disaster, the remaining bodies were reached, and the sickeningly realization came that not all the men had died right away. Some of them had apparently managed to stay afloat on a makeshift raft, finally suffocating in the buried enclosure. When the bodies were finally interred, the tales of ghostly encounters subsided somewhat.

The tunnel was finally completed, and the first train passed through it in 1875. But the story of the tunnel's haunting was far from over. In next week's installment, I will explore the continued legacy of death, mayhem and mystery in northern Berkshire's "bloody pit."

Saucer Fever in the Berkshires

The three week period that began on June 24, 1947 was a curious time in the history of our country. Whether literal or metaphoric, there was definitely something strange in the air. On the 24th, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine disk-shaped objects flying across the sky near Mt. Rainier, Washington. At least twenty other persons across the Pacific Northwest reported seeing the same that day, but it was Arnold’s soberly told account and detailed description that drew the most attention, launching the term ‘flying saucer’ into its place in the American lexicon. Over the following days, as media spread discussion of Arnold’s story, others began coming forward all over the country, saying that they too had spotted similar objects. The trickle became a deluge on July 4, as many of the millions of people celebrating Independence Day outside looked up toward the sky and saw something they couldn’t account for.

That day marked the first mention of disks seen east of the Mississippi, as claims of sightings poured in from 28 states. Newspapers across the country had a field day, and the Berkshires were no exception. The Eagle interviewed Dr. John Lynn, a behavioral scientist from Valhalla, N.Y., who attributed the phenomenon to anxieties about atomic weapons. He also compared them to the scare brought on by Orson Welles’ War of the World broadcast nearly a decade earlier- a particularly interesting statement, considering the fact that no one had yet suggested any connection between the saucers and anything extraterrestrial.

Meanwhile, some area residents had already spotted what they believed to be examples of the bizarre objects. A group of four Pittsfield residents, while watching the parade (described as the longest and best to date at that time) observed a disk overhead around 10:45. One of the witnesses, Mrs. Sidney Smith of Pomeroy Avenue, described it as “round, colorless, luminous object with a peculiar rolling motion.” The saucer sped off south, gaining altitude as it went. Reaction among residents who had not seen anything was mixed, as far as can be judged by a random survey of people on North Street on July 7. “I certainly don’t think it’s imagination, not with so many people seeing them,” said a Pittsfield photographer, “It’s either what some foreign government is sending over, or an experiment of our own army.” John Foley of Foley’s Restaurant had a simpler explanation: “Somebody’s got the DT’s.”

By that time, “saucer fever” was reaching fever pitch across the country, with sightings having been reported in 38 states and parts of Canada. By the 8th, similar reports were coming in from Europe, Australia and Africa. That same day also saw national reporting of an Air Force official’s announcement that a crashed saucer had been recovered by the military near Roswell, New Mexico. Though retracted the following day, this press release had already given birth to a controversy that would last more than half a century.

Sightings continued in Berkshire County as well. Mrs. Fairfield Osborne spotted one while staying as a guest at the Stockbridge home of Margaret Cresson, the daughter of famed sculptor Daniel Chester French. Mrs. Osborne said that prior to this she had never heard of the flying saucer phenomenon, but after viewing the strange aerial shape she consulted some recent newspapers and found that the descriptions there matched what she had seen exactly. She told reporters that what she had seen had been a brilliantly illuminated round object “like an automobile headlight in the sky.” The bright object appeared to hover around the top of Mount Everett, about 25 miles away. A few seconds later, it vanished entirely from view. Two similar bright objects were seen by architect Charles Masterson of Crane Avenue in Pittsfield, though Masterson admitted they may have been planes.

Over the following days the wave of interest in the new saucer phenomenon lessened in intensity as reports of sightings began to drop off. Whether this was because the sightings themselves had ebbed, or because by then an organized campaign of derision had been brought to bear in combating what some officials considered a dangerous panic (i.e., one that might interfere with public recognition and interest in more “real” national security threats) and people stopped coming forward so readily, is a debatable point. Various kinds of experts continued to attribute the wave to fears about nuclear warfare, or alternately, as Orville Wright, among others, believed, to government seeded fear-mongering. Most predicted that it would soon pass and be largely forgotten. This was not an unreasonable assumption on their part. Prior waves of unidentified flying objects, like the “mystery airships” widely reported in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, or the “foo fighters” of World War II, though never completely explained, had been filed away in a dusty backroom of the national consciousness. But for whatever reason, this was not the case this time. “Saucer culture,” as one commentator called it, was here to stay, and the UFO phenomenon- whether physical, metaphysical, or sociological- has gone through cycles of greater and lesser interest, but never faded completely.

So, while this was certainly not the last time that a UFO sighting has been reported in the region (nor the first, according to some sources), it is worth noting that the seeds for this as a staple of American subject matter were sown in a space of a couple of weeks- and the Berkshires were very much a part of it, getting in on the ground floor of a most curious chapter of history.

Ace Pilot lost over southern Berkshire

There is something about the concept of humans flying through the air that we as a species seem to have a built-in incredulity about. Long before flight was even a remote possibility, various cultures the world over had stories outlining its seemingly inevitable failure. Icarus’ plunge into the sea is a well-worn favorite from classical mythology – though many overlook the fact that Daedalus survived the flight from Crete just fine, and one out of two really ain’t so bad, when you’re dealing with wax-based aerial technology. Those folks in Genesis also got themselves in quite a mess just for trying to take the long route to the upper atmosphere with the Tower of Babel. Even after the reality of human flight had been repeatedly demonstrated, some folks just couldn’t bring themselves to accept it. For example, in January 1906, more than two years after the Wright Brothers first successful flights at Kitty Hawk, a no less respected publication than Scientific American was denouncing the Wright flights as a fable for the gullible.

Though most people have, I presume, by now accepted the fact of air travel, there may always be a lingering undercurrent of skepticism about its safety and efficacy- a primordial instinct that tends to bubble closer to the surface following any publicized plane crash. It is reflected even more keenly, though, in the fascination we have with aircraft that go permanently missing. The name Amelia Earhart, for instance, is unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon. Likewise, the alleged “Bermuda Triangle” has, since it was first hypothesized 55 years ago, provoked endless debate, innumerable (and for the most part thoroughly unwatchable) television movies, and even board games. All of which is but elaborate preface to this week’s meditation on a case that has long interested me: the ill-fated flight of Captain Mansell R. James, believed to have gone missing over the hills of southern Berkshire in the summer of 1919.

It should be mentioned at the outset that James was no novice when it came to piloting an airplane. He was a decorated veteran of the Royal Air Force, an ace who had brought down no less than ten enemy planes. Just prior to his final, fateful flight, he had just collected a $1,000 prize for a competitive flight from Atlantic City to Boston. While returning from Boston to New Jersey on May 28, he ran into trouble and had to make a forced landing in Lee. The following day, he took off from there around 11:00 a.m., headed for Mitchel Field in Long Island, where he intended to refuel for the next leg of his flight. This was the last time anyone ever saw him.

When he never arrived in Atlantic City, they assumed that he may have changed his mind and started out for Toronto, where another major aerial contest was taking place. When word came that this was not so, and that he had never even arrived at Long Island, a search began on June 2 in the area south of where he had taken off. By June 4, five planes were searching full time, spread out across southern Berkshire County and northwestern Connecticut. Search parties grew in manpower and planes over the following days, U.S., Canadian, and British Air Forces pitching in to help locate the missing ace. A considerable fleet of planes conducted fly-overs of western Massachusetts, Connecticut, the Hudson River and the Long Island Sound, but not a trace of Captain James or his Sopwith scout plane could be spied. Numerous theories and ideas were kicked around, but none led to locating the (presumably) downed aircraft.

Over time, many people saw what they believed to have been the crash site of the famous flyer. Early in August, wreckage was reported from a gull at Connecticut’s Mt. Riga, but this turned out not to be his plane. A week or so later, three men fishing near Branford saw what they thought was the wing of the missing craft, but this too proved to be a false lead. Finally, more than six years later, in December, 1925, the best lead to date manifested. While hunting in “a remote section of Tyringham,” one Warren Campbell became separated from his companions, and subsequently stumbled onto the wreckage of a small plane half-buried in brush. As it appeared to have been there for several years, Campbell assumed that others had come across the overgrown debris in the past, so did not bother to mark the spot. Only when he finally found his way out of the woods and told the others about it was it suggested that this could have been the craft of the lost British ace. Unfortunately Campbell, a Brooklyn native, was unable to guide them back to the spot where he had seen the wreck. Several days of extensive searching ensued, covering miles of forest and swamp without success. To the best of my knowledge, the location of Captain James’ crash site remains a mystery.

The fact that James failed to reach his destination is in itself not resoundingly mysterious. He had after all just made a forced landing in Lee the day before, after unspecified difficulties. Furthermore, when he left Lee that day, it was without a compass. The mystery is in the total failure to find any trace of the plane, despite extensive searches of the region, in which the Air Forces of three different nations all became involved at one point or another.

More than eighty years later, a number of questions remain. What precisely was the cause of the talented pilot’s failure to reach Long Island? Was the debris spotted in the woods of Tyringham the remnant of James’ missing plane- and if not, whose was it? Has anyone since stumbled onto the wreckage and, like Campbell, made little note of it, assuming it had been discovered long before? Perhaps someday answers to these questions will come to light, but at this time, it remains one of many aviation mysteries, a local chapter in the sometimes tragic history of humankind’s precarious mastery of the sky.

Do hardy monkeys still thrive in the Berkshires?

The folkloric record of Western Civilization is full of stories of animals popping up where they ought not to be.

The literature on unexplained phenomenon is replete not only with controversial creatures, such as Bigfoot, Nessie and El Chupacabras, but with animals whose existence no one disputes, but who seem to be flouting all zoological convention in their choice of habitat. Hundreds of reports of such appearances have been recorded: alligators turning up randomly in major cities, kangaroos hopping about the Midwest, panthers skulking about the Australian bush or the English countryside - these are but a few examples. These kinds of stories greatly appeal to me, perhaps because they depict a kind of renegade spirit in the animal kingdom, a certain pluckiness in nature that defies our attempts to neatly order and catalogue it.

I discovered a story of this sort in the November 8, 1908 edition of the Berkshire Evening Eagle. Anthony and Louis Spiewak, two brothers who lived on Broadview Terrace in Pittsfield, had been hunting for grouse in Lanesboro four days earlier when they had a most uncommon encounter. They heard a rustling in some nearby trees and went to check it out. They were shocked to find out that the source of the rustling had not been birds, as they expected, but instead two monkeys scampering about. It's not every day that monkeys can be seen roaming wild in the Berkshires, and the Spiewak brothers were understandably perplexed. Where could they have come from?

An explanation, of sorts, was not long in coming. Oliver Pillizzaro, proprietor of Red's Dairy Bar on Cheshire Road, said that he believed that the pair had to have been ones who escaped from his care back in June. For several years, a group of monkeys he owned had served as an attraction to draw customers to his business. In June, three of them had broken loose and taken off into the woods. One of them returned on its own soon after, but after a three-day search no sign of the other two could be found, and they were given up for lost.

Now, as any school child knows, monkeys thrive in locales throughout the southern hemisphere, and are hardly accustomed to the kind of weather conditions that autumn in the Berkshires entails. Nonetheless, the Spiewaks told reporters that the fugitive simians seemed utterly unperturbed, and even appeared quite healthy and happy in their surroundings. As for Pillizzaro, he was surprised to hear that they were alive at all, given the freezing temperatures that they had been faced with that fall.

The befuddled owner said that he intended to organize a search party to scour the area where they had been seen, in the hopes of recovering his pets. I have not been able to find out whether or not any such mission was undertaken successfully, or if the monkeys were ever spotted again by anyone else in the region.

Personally, I like to imagine that the pair never was apprehended. Perhaps, I muse, they somehow found it possible to adapt to the chilly Northeastern winter, as some of their distant primate cousins did in the past, and lived out the remainder of their natural lives in this new environment, snacking on a range of exotic herbivorous cuisine as they frolicked merrily through the forest. Perhaps they mated the following spring, and a few of their descendants still reside in isolate pockets of forest, a safe distance from their noisy cousins. On the other hand, maybe they migrated that very winter, striking out for warmer regions, as certain other area residents have been known to do. I realize, of course, that these are all pretty whimsical speculations on my part, and not terribly plausible.

Then again, they're not that much less plausible than the story was to begin with - or than most of what I read in the papers any other day, for that matter. These hills are alive with the song of unlikely scenarios, and there certainly seems to be far more to primate behavior than is dreamt of in my philosophy.

Vermonters go vampire slaying in Manchester

The Advocate-08/18/2005

Down through the ages, the figure of the vampire has exercised a great power over the human imagination. Whether this figure takes the form of the Greek lamia, the Malaysian langsuyar, the Serbian vukodlak or Bram Stoker's iconic Transylvanian count, people from all different cultural backgrounds have found themselves simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by this mythos.

Fascinated, in part, because in the vampire we see an individual who does not lie at rest at death, as we ourselves must, but goes forth from the grave, straddling the world of the living and that of the dead - meanwhile repulsed because this creature lives like a parasite off our most precious bodily commodity, spreading its own brand of damnation through our ranks as it does.

It was mainly this latter factor that concerned the people of Manchester, Vt., in the year 1793, according to an incident recorded in John S. Pettibone's Early History of Manchester." Three years earlier, Captain Isaac Burton lost his wife, Rachel, to consumption, or "the White Death," as it was sometimes known. A year or so later, Burton married again, to a girl by the name of Hulda Powel. Not long after, Hulda also began showing telltale signs of the same decline: an unnatural pallor, loss of vitality and a bloody cough. By February 1793, the girl was in the late stages of the disease. It was at this point that a number of Manchesterites reached a conclusion that to our modern minds must come across as nothing short of preposterous.

The wasting away of Burton's wives, they concluded, was due to the sinister agency of a "demon vampire." To save Hulda, it was thought, the vampirism had to be stopped - and this would require a most odious procedure. The body of Burton's deceased wife, Rachel, was disinterred, and what remained of her heart, liver and lungs were removed. They were taken to Jacob Mead's blacksmith forge, where they were burned until nothing but ash remained. Sadly, despite this grisly attempt at a cure, Hulda continued to weaken, passing away the following September.

Macabre and mystifying as such a scenario may seem to us, there is a great deal of evidence that this was not a wholly uncommon practice in early New England. In his book Food for the Dead, Rhode Island folklorist Michael Bell lists the approximately 20 such incidents in New England he has uncovered from the late 18th through to the late 19th century. Many others may have gone unrecorded. With close examination of the historic and folkloric record, it becomes clear that this practice was looked upon by its participants as being less like a supernatural exorcism than as simply a loosely accepted form of folk medicine (and in some cases, this method was recommended and even overseen by trained physicians).

Keep in mind that these New Englanders were battling a scourge they could not have hoped to comprehend, and one that was increasingly prevalent. Tuberculosis had been on the rise in North America since around 1730, and by 1800 accounted for 25 percent of all deaths. It remained the leading cause of death throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. For most of that time, its precise cause remained unknown. All that was known was what could be readily observed: that this was a kind of contagion that moved unseen from victim to victim, often within families and close-knit groups, draining away the vitality of a person - just like a vampire. The fact that upon exhumation, many bodies were found to display features of decomposition which had not yet been explained by science, such as posthumous hair and nail growth and blood coagulated in the heart and around the mouth, tended to lend credence to the vampire theory.

These were not people who were particularly morbid, sadistic or amoral, as some later commentators opined; just decent communities willing to pursue any option, unpleasant and grotesque though it might have been, to save the lives of their loved ones and neighbors. In the context of their own era, their actions were not all that irrational. Given the significant limitations that still exist in today's medicine, I cannot help but wonder: How many of our own disease-fighting methods will be looked upon by future historians as little more than well-intentioned barbarism?

A Poltergeist in Pownal?

There was a time, less than two centuries ago, when if you claimed that a stone fell from the sky, you could expect that at some point someone would say you were deluded, or a liar, or worse. Certainly, any well-educated, rational person would scoff at you. Why? Well, because, there are no stones in the sky, silly. Therefore stones cannot fall from the sky.

Today, of course, in our infinitely more knowledgeable times, they’d just call that meteor activity. Now if you were to say that you saw many stones fall, for a prolonged period of time (like weeks, or months), from several different directions at once- up and sideways as well as down- well, then you might once again be in line for some ridicule. At the very minimum, a condescendingly patient explanation about how what it seemed like you saw wasn’t actually what you saw, because, silly, stones don’t just up and act like that. When they move at all, it is in chartable, predictable ways, dictated by known physical processes. Of course, at some point, someone might drop the word ‘poltergeist’ into the conversation- a tricky word, which in German means something along the lines of “noisy or mischievous spirit,” and in English tends to mean something roughly equivalent to “I don’t know, leave me alone.”

It was in the fall of 1874 that a farmer from North Pownal found himself in a predicament along these lines. Sometime in October, Thomas Paddock- described as “a respectable farmer, of excellent character” by the Burlington Free Press and Times- found his house and barns under a brutal bombardment from reoccurring showers of stones. Fearing precisely the kind of derision referred to above, Paddock and his family tried to keep the occurrences a secret. Word got out, however, as always it does in such bizarre matters. Witnesses described rocky showers that ensued intermittently, apparently out of the clear sky. They were said to fall randomly at all hours of the day and night, and varied in size from tiny pebbles to five inches in diameter. At one point, one fell that weighed more than twenty pounds, and left a three-inch crater in solidly frozen ground. A number of people tried to duplicate this incident by hurling similar boulders, but made scarcely any impression at all.

Nor was this the strangest aspect of it all. The stones did not behave at all as falling stones ought. When they hit the ground, they did not bounce or skip; instead, they just rolled calmly along the ground. They also tended to be warm to the touch. Worst of all, witnesses reported that on occasion they would make contact on the roof near the eaves, then, as if possessed, roll slowly up the roof and back down the other side.

Can this possibly true? Stones that fall from the sky? Stones that roll up? Admittedly, there are probably gaping holes in my meteorological knowledge, but this does not seem at all like any meteorites I have ever heard of. Certainly not meteorites with any sense of propriety.

Still, these happenings are not without precedent. Dedicated Advocate readers will recall a similar case from Sheffield that I wrote about in October, and there are a number of others in New England history. The earliest of these seems to be from New Hampshire, where the home of George Walton was barraged for months by similarly cantankerous stones. The occurrences were witnessed by the Secretary of the Colony, Richard Chamberlain, who coined the term “Lithobolia” to describe it, intertwining the Greek word “Lithos” with the Latin “diabolis,” or devil- a “stone-throwing devil.”

According to the late D. Scott Rogo, noted parapsychologist, stone-throwing is one of the most commonly reported kinds of poltergeist phenomenon. “Sometimes rocks will bombard the outside of a house,” he writes, “or sometimes…the inside… the rocks themselves are sometimes found to be warm to the touch… and will often follow odd trajectories.” These kind of poltergeists also seem to have a long history worldwide. The Annales Fuldenses chronicles a case of apparently supernatural stone-throwing in 858 A.D. in the small town of Bingen on the Rhine, where Roman forces were fighting the gauls. Other historical records expose a case even farther back, in 530 A.D., that afflicted the home of the chief physician to the Ostrogoth King Theodoric.

In the case of the stonings in Pownal, a variety of potential explanations were offered. One medium from Hoosac Falls claimed that the spirit of a local woman was responsible, and would not stop until the stones were removed from the coffin in which her body lay. Perhaps the most outlandish theory was presented by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (a paper with a reputation for whimsical and sardonic editorializing) who speculated that a man with “a new style of catapult with which fortifications can be stormed at a distance, has been practicing with it on a mountain nearby.”

Reporters who covered the story claimed that his house was situated that no human prankster could have possibly thrown the stones without being seen. Nevertheless, this was the suspicion of a group of “investigators” from North Adams (who, curiously, are not referred to by name in any of the newspaper accounts) who ventured up to Pownal that December. According to their account of the inquiries they made, their suspicion from the outset was that a hired boy by the name of Jerry was the culprit. They told reporters later that one of them remarked to Jerry how interested he was in Spiritualism, and wished that he could witness the extraordinary phenomenon himself. Later, while Jerry was off doing his chores, a stone came tumbling over the roof of the house. At this point, according to the Hoosac Valley News, “Not wishing to wound the feelings of Mr. Paddock, who firmly believes the imposition so long practiced upon him to be the work of spirits; and not caring to have any trouble with Jerry, the visitors departed, convinced that they had solved the mystery.”

There are problems with the account given by the North Adams skeptics, however. According to their report, “No one but Jerry had ever seen the stones fall.” Yet this does not agree at all with earlier reports published in the Troy Press, the Rutland Herald, and the Burlington Free Press, who state unequivocally that the bombardments had been witnessed by many dozens of people, several of whom are quoted by name. Furthermore, Jerry himself was present and accounted for among the crowd of onlookers during most of these incidents. Their assertion that Paddock believed the stones to be the work of spirits was also patently false, as he had stated repeatedly in earlier interviews that he did not believe spirits were to blame. Finally, their explanation failed to account for the extreme behavior of many of the flying stones.

The pattern of this case has more than a passing resemblance to many of the other New England “lithobolia” incidents I have looked at. In most of these cases, and adolescent is present at the time of most of the stone hurling, and at some point or another someone suggests a connection between the two. Usually though, the child is in plain view when the stones come flying, apparently out of nowhere. Perhaps more importantly, common sense suggests to most that while young boys (or girls) are certainly capable of a wide variety of mischief, the idea of one having the attention span for such ongoing, elaborately systematic pranks, stretching out over weeks or months in most cases, is harder to take seriously than a stone-throwing demon. An alternative interpretation is offered by parapsychologist William Roll, who has spent decades studying alleged poltergeist cases. He calls this phenomenon Recurrent Spontaneous Psycho-Kinesis, the idea that that a high level of emotional tension, if repressed, can produce outward physical effects which are consistent with poltergeist reports. This, he predicts, would no doubt be particularly seen in young persons, who do not usually have the power to redress their grievances by conventional and socially acceptable means.

Of course, this should not be taken to suggest that you should refrain from grounding your preteen son or daughter when circumstances merit- just don’t be too terribly surprised if you should hear a pebble or two come rolling across the roof of your home.

Selected Sources:

Brooklyn Daily Eagle Dec. 9, 1874

Troy Press, Oct.-Dec., 1874

Hoosac Valley News, Dec. 10, Dec. 17, 1874

Citro, Joseph A. Green Mountain, Dark Tales, 1999

October Mountain Forest Death

On Sunday evening I emailed this week’s installment of my new column for The Advocate Weekly, a print companion to this blog, a piece on odd encounters in October Mountain State Forest. The following morning news broke that a body had been found in the forest, which was later identified as that of 20-year-old Anthony Colucci, missing since July 4. The cause of death has not been determined. The piece itself appeared in print yesterday. I want to take this opportunity to make it known that this is a morbid coincidence, and totally unintentional on my part. Had I found out about the discovery of the body one day earlier, I would have supplied a different column piece for this week. I have no desire to exploit or sensationalize this tragic event, and my heart goes out to Mr. Colucci’s family.

More information on this tragedy:


Capital News 9

North Adams Transcript

Berkshire Eagle

The Disappearing Drunkard

The roads which criss-cross southern Vermont and eastern New York are replete with stories of strange encounters. Tunic Road has its accounts of phantom soldiers; UFOs have been sighted by drivers along Route 7 and also White Creek Road; Route 7 has also been the sight of alleged Bigfoot sightings, as has Prospect Mountain.

One day in the 1970’s, author David J. Pitkin reports, he had a strange roadside encounter of his own while driving to and from Bennington. On his way there from his home in Troy, New York, he happened to spot a man hitchhiking in the distance. As he grew closer, the man’s ragged attire and unkempt hair became apparent, and his weaving back and forth made it quite apparent that the man was blind drunk. Finding in favor of prudence, Pitkin sped by without stopping.

On his return trip, he saw that the man had changed lanes and was now hitchhiking in the opposite direction, toward Troy. Pitkin had intended to keep driving and pass the dubious looking man once more, but just then it began to pour rain. Taking pity, he pulled over and let the man in. The reeking, obviously intoxicated man got into the car. He was nearly incomprehensible, and it was not clear where he was going. They drove in silence, until they reached the outskirts of Troy and stopped at a red light, the man mumbled “This is good enough.” They pulled over and the man stumbled out of the car without closing the door. Pitkin leaned over to close it, and when he looked up, the man was gone. “I scanned the full 360 degrees around my car, for at least a hundred yards in every direction, for at least a hundred yards in every direction. He was nowhere to be seen. Where could he have gone? There were no nearby doorways where he could hide. He had just vanished into thin air.”

Stories of this sort are not rare. Folklorists recognize this as a variant of the “Vanishing Hitchhiker,” a class of urban legend, though the term contemporary legend is gaining ground as the preferred classifier. Modern folklore expert Jan Brunvand calls the Vanishing Hitchhiker narrative “the classic automobile legend.”

“This returning ghost tale,” Brunvand states, “was known by the turn of the century both in the United States and abroad. It acquired the newer automobile motif by the period of the Great Depression, and thereafter spawned a number of subtypes with greatly varied and oddly interlocking details, some of which themselves stemmed from earlier folk legends.”

In one of the most common types, the story centers on a young girl asking for a ride home. Before the driver and passenger reach her house, however, the girl has vanished into thin air. The driver proceeds on to the house anyway, typically because she has left something behind in the car. When he knocks on the door, the person who answers (usually her father) tells the driver that his daughter died on this very day, X amount of years ago. In other versions, the hitchhiker may be a man or an elderly woman dressed in black, who deliver some sort of prophetic message.

In most cases, these stories, like others classed as contemporary legend, are FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) tales, passed on from person to person as a morphing, undocumented narrative, typically introduced with a statement like “this happened to someone my sister’s friend knows,” or “someone who went to my co-worker’s college said…” Therefore, folklorists tend to treat these stories as fictional- socially meaningful, perhaps, but without root in an event taking place in real space time. This becomes problematic, however, when one is confronting a first hand account. It is certainly more awkward to declare something a legend when the something is a specific person coming forward with what they maintain is a personal experience they had in a real place and time. Pitkin’s experience is not a unique occurrence, either; a number of other first hand accounts of vanishing hitchhikers exist. The most well known of these is probably that of a man named Anton Lagrange, from Durban, South Africa, which was documented in an article in FATE by Cynthia Hind.

What are we to make then, of these stories? Are they all lies concocted by a few individuals, inspired by FOAF tales, or do certain concepts taken for granted in the study of folklore beg reexamination? Perhaps the quandary is best stated by University of Pennsylvania folklorist Bill Ellis when he says, “…The major limitation of the folklorist’s perspective is that it presumes that if a story is found in variant form attached to many places and times, then that is proof presumptive that it never happened at any place or time… granted, the vanishing hitchhiker circulates widely and usually in anonymous of friend-of-a-friend form. But does that in itself impugn every firsthand account?”

It does not, I would venture. Too many examples exist to negate the idea that all, or even most, types of FOAF tales arise out of the ether of human imagination without some analogue or antecedent in actual incidents and experiences. Ellis cites the work of Gary Alan Fine, who in researching urban legends of mice in Coca-Cola bottles, found numerous documented cases in which various rodents had been found in different kind of soda containers. Similarly, the immensely popular “alligators in the sewer” tales seem to be rooted in verifiable incidents. Documentation of an apparently quite real problem with alligators in the Manhattan sewer system in the 1930’s has been found in the NY Times and in records of the office of the New York City Commissioner of Sewers.

Folklore is a kind of running social narrative that explores the boundaries of what we know or believe to be real. Perhaps the survival and popularity of many of FOAF tales and contemporary legends, and the reason that they are often believed, is based on an instinctive sense on the part of the population at large that the world really is stranger than we ever give it full credit for, and sometimes, just sometimes, the weirdest things anyone can think up really do happen.

Sources:

Pitkin, David J. Ghosts of the Northeast, 2002

Brunvand, J.H. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & their Meanings, 1981

Ellis, Bill. Aliens, Ghosts & Cults: Legends We Live, 2003

Hind, Cynthia. “Girl Ghost Hitches Ride.” FATE July 1979

Spirits of ’76: Revolutionary Ghosts in the Berkshires

The history of Berkshire County’s involvement in the Revolutionary War is a rich one, full of noteworthy participation in some of the most important actions of the war (the taking of Fort Ticonderoga, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Battle of Bennington, etc) and exotic characters (General John Patterson, James Easton, the “Fighting Parson” Thomas Allen, etc). Given this, it should not be surprising that legends of lingering ghosts from this period abound in the area. As a special Fourth of July installment of These Mysterious Hills, I will present two of my favorite such tales.

The first concerns Franz Wagner, a Hessian soldier attached to General Burgoyne’s forces. Wagner was wounded at the Battle of Saratoga, and died while making his way south after his company was scattered. Some men from North Egremont buried him in the old burial yard there, but it soon became clear that he refused to rest in peace. Within a few days of his burial, rumors began to spread that the Hessian had been seen wandering about at night. He had been seen, with his full uniform glistening in the darkness, wandering around the cemetery, and floating along the banks of the Green River. As whispers of encounters with this formidable specter multiplied, some village men decided to investigate. Two men, Joe Tanner and Tom Hendricks, bolder than the rest, went ahead while the rest of the group trailed a safe distance behind. They advanced slowly to the place where the Hessian had been interred, seeing nothing and beginning to feel slightly silly. When they were nearly upon the grave itself, however, a diaphanous form leaped up from out of the ground. The two men stood there silently, paralyzed with fear and awe, watching it as it slowly drew closer. Wagner’s ghostly form appeared to be moving its mouth, as if trying to speak to them, but no words were heard. This was too much for them, and they turned and ran, the other men fleeing in front of them.

As news of their encounter made its way around town, the level of slight unease in Egremont grew to a state almost akin to a panic. People stopped going out after dark altogether, even for prayer meetings. They even began blocking up their doors. Joe Tanner, convinced that there must be a way to rid the town of the ghost, got together some of the heartier of the men in town to discuss the matter. Tanner suggested that perhaps, if they moved the Hessian’s grave to some other location, he would move on with it and leave them alone. There was some uneasiness about the idea of disinterring a corpse, and some concern that they might get in a bit of trouble with the authorities. In the end, though, they decided that is was the best plan anyone could come up with, and preparations for the task were made.

When the night to enact the gruesome bit of business came, the men assembled, and Tanner brought his wagon along to carry the soldier’s coffin. Sentries were posted at both sides of the cemetery to keep an eye out while this secret project was conducted. Wagner had been a rather large man, and so all the remaining men were required to help haul his coffin up from the grave and move it into the wagon. Once completed, they started out in the darkness heading northeast, Joe Tanner and two others in the wagon with the Hessian and the rest on horseback. When they reached the eastern side of Tom Ball Mountain they found they could take the wagon no farther, and Tanner and the other two men left the others with the coffin while they went ahead into the forest to look for a good burial spot.

They didn’t get far before they heard clamorous screaming behind them. Running back to the wagon, they saw a horrible sight: the vapory Hessian was sitting atop his coffin in the back of the wagon. Once again, he appeared to be trying to talk, but no sound came out. The men all around the wagon scrambled down from their horses and took cover, fearing some sort of violent reprisal from the ghost. When they looked over again, he was gone. They leapt to their feet and grabbed the coffin up, heading into the woods with it as quickly as possible. They went a little ways up the eastern base of the mountain to a natural hollow, at which point they grabbed their spades and began digging as fast as their arms would work. When they dug a suitably deep hole, they deposited the coffin inside (carefully, lest they arouse the Hessian’s anger any further). They rode out of there that night, and did not speak of the incident again until sometime after, when the threat of getting into trouble had subsided, and the whole story came out publicly.

In later years it was said that the Hessian had been seen, from time to time, wandering the woods on the side of Tom Ball, and around West Stockbridge, but he was never again seen in Egremont.

***

Another tale of spectral soldiers dates back to the spring of 1977. Caleb Hudson, who deserted from the Continental Army at the Battle of Breed’s Hill, was on his way to a meeting of Tories at the home of Jared Musgrove in east Lee. Word had it that General Washington was on route to meet up with the colonial troops positioned in Connecticut and eastern New York, where they intended to stop the advance of British troops under General Tyron.

The Berkshire area Tories new that many attempts had been made to kidnap Washington, but none so far had succeeded. Now, another such plot was being hatched. It was decided that to avert suspicion falling on the Connecticut Loyalists nearest to the area, the plan should be handled by Berkshire men, who could slip into the Patriot encampment unrecognized under the auspices of joining up. They could then get close enough to steal away with the Continental commander in the night. Six men were selected from their midst to undertake the operation. Caleb Hudson was among them, much to his chagrin. Caleb, apparently, did not have much of a stomach for real war action on either side, though he was not above joining in on the looting of Patriot farms when the risk of being caught was minimal.

It was decided that each of the six men should ride south separately, so as not to be noticed, and meet up in Ridgefield, Connecticut, from whence they would proceed with their devious mission. So Caleb set out on horseback, and began making his way south. He never made it very far. As he reached south Lee and prepared to cross the Housatonic River, he saw a regiment of continental soldiers on the march. Fearing that they might be looking for recruits and that he might be conscripted into service, he hung back in the brush while they passed by. The troops marched by, hundreds of them, eight abreast, and slowly it dawned upon Caleb that there was something not right. They were making no noise at all. Not a single sound was coming up from any of them.

His horse began rearing and snorting, clearly disturbed. Hudson tried to calm the mare but she was becoming increasingly upset and would not be still. He feared the soldiers would take note, but they never looked up, just proceeded to ford the river silently. Caleb looked on in horror as dozens or rows of pale, deathly still soldiers entered into the river. Not a single soldier came out the other side. They simply vanished.

At this point his horse took off, with him holding on for dear life, and sped off. He rode and rode and did not stop or slow until he reached the South Lee Inn, where, pale-faced and trembling, he told his tale (minus the nature of his journey south) to the bemused bartender there. That was the end of Caleb Hudson’s involvement in the Tory cause.


Sources:

Coxey, Willard Douglas. Ghosts of Old Berkshire, 1934

Belland, Debra & Frederick Talarico. There's no place like home: a journey through the rich legacy of the Berkshires, 2000


FOR MORE ON BERKSHIRE COUNTY REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY, SEE:

Berkshire Patriots

Berkshire Tories

Over the Edge: Lover's Leap Legends in the Berkshires

Bash Bish Falls


According to legend, Bash Bish Falls, in the extreme southwest corner of Berkshire County, draws its name from the Indian woman Bash-Bish, who lived in a village near the falls. She was well liked because of her good-looks and equally pleasant nature, but her beauty did occasionally provoke jealously from the other squaws. Eventually, this led one of her friends to accuse her of adultery against her husband. Though she protested her innocence, the village elders sentenced her to death. She was strapped to a canoe and set adrift atop the falls. The moment before she tumbled down, a halo appeared around her head, and a ring of butterflies encircled her. Frightened, some of the men went below, where they found pieces of her canoe, but no sign of Bash Bish. They concluded that she must have been a witch.

Years passed, and though stories of the incident were told, it lapsed into the background. Meanwhile, Bash Bish had left a daughter, White Swan, too young to truly remember her mother. As the years passed, White Swan grew even more beautiful than her mother, and became the wife of the chief's son, Wey-au-wey-ya (Whirling Wind). However, despite their best efforts, she remained unable to conceive, and some of the older men whispered among themselves that perhaps this was the gods' punishment to the tribe for their execution of Bash Bish. Perhaps, they thought, it might even be her own witchcraft that cursed her daughter. Reluctantly, Whirling Wind took a second wife, for it was imperative that the chief's son have a son of his own. White Swan grew increasingly despondent at her failure to bear children, eventually ceasing to leave the wigwam at all. One day, Whirling Wind returned to the wigwam to learn from his second wife that White Swan had run off toward the falls. By the time he reached the base of the falls, he saw her standing on the protruding rock platform above.

"Mother, mother," she cried out over the falls, "Mother, take me into your arms." Whirling Wind was then shocked to see the glowing, ethereal figure of a white-robed woman step out of the water beneath, stretching out her arms to White Swan. Panicked, he began clambering up the rocks to the platform. She turned to look at him.

"Wey-au-wey-ya, my brave, my chief," she whispered, and then turned back to the rushing waters. "Mother," she cried, and dropped forward into the waterfall. Crying her name, the brave leaped after her into the water, and was lost. Later, the chief and his men found his son's body, but not White Swan's. Some say that her face, and that of her mother, can sometimes still be seen in the pool below. *

***
Monument Mountain, standing between Stockbridge and Great Barrington, is best remembered as being the site of the first meeting between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, in 1850. The former, who was then struggling through Moby Dick, and the latter, who had just completed the Scarlet Letter, were accompanied by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who carried along ice and a bottle of champagne in his emptied doctor's bag. Melville later dedicated his masterpiece to his new friend.

Long before that meeting, Monument Mountain was known as the site of yet another native girl's sorrowful leap. A beautiful maiden from the Mahican settlement in Stockbridge fell in love with her warrior cousin, who was forbidden to her by tribal law. She tried in vain to rid herself of these feelings, but they persisted, and she grew more and more unhappy. She began to wither away. The poet William Cullen Bryant**, who based a poem on the legend, describes her spiral:

"She went to weep where no eye saw, and was not found
When all the merry girls were met to dance,
And all the hunters of the tribe were out;
Nor when they gathered from the rustling husk
The shining ear; nor when, by the river's side,
They pulled the grape and startled the wild shades
With sounds of mirth."

Eventually, she could bear no more torment. She dressed herself in her finest jewelry and ornamentation, wove flowers into her hair, and made her way up the mountain, where she climbed up the face of the pillar known as Devil's Pulpit. She waited there until dusk, and then threw herself down the face of the cliff. It is said that her tribe buried her body on the slope of the mountain and marked it with a pile of stones (thus accounting for the cairn which can still be seen there to this day).

***
At least one version of the story of the native girl Wahconah, from whom the waterfall in Dalton gets its name, ends in a similar manner. Wahconah was a Pequot, part of a group of them who had been driven up from Connecticut. As the story goes, she was at the waterfall when she encountered a Wampanoag named Nessacus, who had made his way west after the death of his chief, Metacomet (this places the story in a more concrete historical context than the previous ones, sometime in 1676). Wahconah gave him lodging with her tribe on behalf of her father Miacomo, the chief, who was off negotiating with the Mohawks on the other side of the Taconic Mountains. Over the course of the next few days, Nessacus and Wahconah became enamored with one another. However, when her father returned, he brought with him the much older Mohawk warrior Yonnongah, to whom he had promised his daughter as wife. Nessacus challenged Yonnongah to a dual to decide who would marry the girl, but Tashmu, the scheming village shaman who favored the Mohawks, argued against this. Tashmu said that he would go that night to Wizard's Glen (an array of rocks with a somewhat dark and mysterious body of lore of its own) with the Mohawk, to ask the spirits which of the suitors they favored. Instead, he went to the brook and with Yonnongah's help dug out one side so that it was much deeper than the other.

In the morning, Tashmu told the tribe that the spirits had said for them to place the girl in a canoe and float it down the river to where the rock divides it. Nessacus and Yonnongah would each stand on one side, and whichever side she passed the rock on would indicate who she should marry. The canoe was then let go a good distance upstream from the rock. Tashmu, of course, had placed the Mohawk on the deeper side. He was therefore shocked to see that the canoe drifted over to the other side, grounding by the feet of Nessacus.*** Enraged that he had been foiled, Tashmu left the tribe and went east, where he betrayed them by guiding Major John Talcott to the valley (-here history once more pokes its head into the legend narrative, for Talcott is known to have pursued a band of Wampanoag into the Berkshires as part of the last major skirmish of King Phillip's War, becoming the first known white man to enter the area).

In most versions, Tashmu was slain, either by Nessacus or by one of the other Pequot warriors, and the tribe moved on west. In one version, however, Nessacus himself was slain in battle. Stricken with grief, Wahconah leaped to her death from the top of the falls.

***

What lies behind all these legends of love gone wrong, ending in a suicidal lead from a high precipice?

Stories of "Lover's Leaps" are to be found throughout history. The first recorded location of such incidents appears to be a cliff on the southwest side of the Greek island of Leucadia. It was here, some classical sources tell us, that the poet Sappho of Lesbos, and Queen Artemisia of Caria, ended the sorrow of their impossible love by plunging into the sea.

It is a common motif in American Indian lore. Folklorist Jan Brunvand, in his American Folklore: An Encyclopedia defines the Lover's Leap motif: "Typically, two Indian lovers, often from different tribes, are prevented from marrying because of tribal enmity or taboo; in despair or defiance, one or both commit suicide by jumping off a precipice."
In a paper on lover's leap legends, philosophy professor Phil Hoebing points out that there is no single explanation for the existence of such legends. He voices the opinion that many may be products of the western imagination, and that the proximity of high ledges may be one factor, adding in that tourism may help perpetuate the legend, as it makes a romantic addition to tours of scenic sites.

How do we explain the existence of so many such legends concentrated in one small regional area, though? Can we posit that these stories fulfilled some social function, either for the natives who lived there first, or for later European communities? Or do some real events underlie these occurrences, as the historical details in the case of the Wahconah story, and the physical existence of the rock pile at Monument Mountain, might suggest?

In his book Suicide Clusters, Loren Coleman demonstrates how accounts of a suicide, when spread (today by modern media forms, in earlier times by oral tradition), can shape the method by which other suicidal individuals, especially in the same community or neighboring communities, decide to take their lives. Perhaps something of this nature took place in the Berkshire Hills, at some point in the distant past. Perhaps there was a spate of such suicides by jumping, egged on by the contagion effect that seems to be at work in cycles of suicide behavior. It may have had nothing to do with doomed or unrequited love, but with unbearable pressures brought on by the incursion of colonial settlers in the late 17th and early 18th century, and only later been remembered in a few romanticized stories.

We cannot know for sure. All we can do is look up at these lofty places, marveling at the way the hills stand sentinel over the horizon, silently holding on to the secrets of their history.


Endnotes:

*There have been a number of accidental deaths at Bash Bish Falls over the years as well. During the 1960's, climbers and swimmers died there at a rate of two or three a year. Swimming is now prohibited, and climbing is allowed only by special permit from the parks department.

** According to yet another local legend, Bryant himself eventually returned to the Berkshires as a ghost.

*** In my favorite twist on this legend, one version claims that after the canoe contest, one of the braves from the tribe found a large twig jutting out of the brook. It occurred to him that it by using such a twig against the mud at the bottom of the brook, it would have been possible for Wahconah to have steered the canoe in whichever direction she chose. He told Miacomo of his suspicions, but the old chief only nodded, smiling.

Selected Sources:

Belland, Debra & Frederick Talarico. There's no place like home: a journey through the rich legacy of the Berkshires, 2000

Brunvand, Jan. American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, 1998

Coleman, Loren. Suicide Clusters, 1987

Coxey, Willard Douglas. Ghosts of Old Berkshire, 1934

Hoebing, Phil. Legends of Lover's Leaps, 2001

Bryant, William Cullen, 1794-1878: Poems

-Various other oral and written versions of these three legends.

The Enchanted State Forest

Among the most extraordinary and curious places in Berkshire County, as far as I'm concerned, is October Mountain State Forest.

The name 'October Mountain' was apparently first coined by Herman Melville in a short story from 1853 entitled "Cock-a- doodle-doo." He referred to it as such, he explained, "on account of its hampered aspect in that month." He later wrote another, fairly unremarkable short story called "October Mountain" for Putnam Magazine.

The largest state forest in Massachusetts, it consists of over 11,000 acres of land in Washington, Lenox, Lee and Becket. Most of this land was once the estate of William C. Whitney, who served as Secretary of the Navy under President Cleveland. It was purchased by a group of individuals in 1915, and donated to the state.

Long before Whitney, though, it was here that Gideon Smith, one of Berkshire County's most determined Loyalists, fled after it was learned that he had harbored a British prisoner-of-war. There he hid out in a gorge which hence became known as Tories Glen. There, legend has it, Indians from the settlement at Stockbridge brought him food and kept him protected from the zealous Berkshire patriots until the end of the war.

Also on the mountain is a small cemetery from the 19th century, which has long been said to be haunted. Stories have been told of people hearing strange humming noises and of seeing a ghostly young girl in a white dress. If these tales are true, the most likely candidate for the identity of this ghost would have to be a girl named Anna Pease. According to her headstone, Anna died on January 22, 1829 at the age of 10. The daughter of one Olivea Pease, who died in 1850, she appears to be the only female child in the small graveyard.

More than ghosts may be lurking in the dense woods, however. In 1983, two Pittsfield men were picnicking near the site of Camp Eagle, an old Boy Scout camp on Felton Lake, when they saw what they claimed was some strange anthropoid creature in the woods. They described it as dark brown, and standing erect at between six or seven feet tall. They said that it appeared to have glowing eyes, though this could have been due to the fact that it was standing in the path of their headlights when they saw it. A similar sighting was reported to have occurred in 1989. A hiker nearing the top of the mountain saw something large moving in the brush, about a hundred yards away. He at first thought it might have been a bear, until he stopped and looked at it through binoculars. What he beheld then was an extremely tall animal standing erect, covered all over in reddish hair or fur. It had a very human face, and extremely long arms. It appeared to be grubbing for roots or insects in a very methodical way- stacking the rocks that it moved upon each other in a neat pile.

Perhaps these creatures have even attracted some attention beyond that of humans. Some time around 1970, when Camp Eagle was still open, a scout there witnessed two unusual lights hovering in the sky. They appeared to be checking a certain spot over and over again. At no time did either object make any noise at all. After about five minutes of this, they shot off vertically into the sky, one after another, at incredible speed.

To top off this list of weird happenings, the forest has even, in recent years, had sightings of the elusive and controversial eastern panther, according to an article in last year's Berkshire Eagle. I cannot help but wonder, what other strange sightings may not have been reported, and what other unknown mysteries might this dense, sprawling forest hold?

Selected Sources:

Melville, Herman. Great Short Works of Herman Melville Perennial Press, 1970

Skinner, Charles M. Myths and Legends of Our Own Land J.P. Lippincott, 1896

The Berkshire Eagle August 23, 1983; February 23, 2004

National UFO Reporting Center

The Old Britton Place

Clapp Park, circa 1945


I've been collecting and tracking down strange tales and bits of lore long enough to have noticed that in searching for reputedly haunted places and spooky stories, one tends to find great laundry lists of the former, accompanied by a significantly shorter quantity of the latter. A great many of the places pointed out to me as being tinged with the mystical are joined by such vague references as "people have seen stuff there" (my subsequent "which people?" "what sort of stuff?" typically being countered with a shrug) or "strange things have gone on there" ("such as?" again, the shrug). Subsequent prodding and research without any more elucidation have lead me conclude that frequently these reputations are built on vapors, and not the ectoplasmic sort, either.

Some of the houses are haunted only by rotting wood and negligible real-estate values, while many demon-infested woods have more to do with Boy Scout campers hopped up on sugar and high school students hopped up on, well, hops- both groups managing to spook themselves silly with joggling flashlights and snapping twigs, than with preternatural manifestations. On occasion, however, these vague allusions are rooted in much older, more complete narratives that may be buried in the cracks of recorded history, virtually forgotten by even the most elder members of a community. Such seems to be the case with the area surrounding Pittsfield's Clapp Park. Some time ago I found, on a list of haunted places provided by the website http://www.theshadowlands.net , a brief fragment sentence describing paranormal activity around the train tracks by Clapp Park. It mentioned that "large white silhouettes have been spotted", and furthermore that "mysterious footsteps and blood-stained, almost ape-like fingerprints frequently occur."

As all of the entries on that particular website are submitted by random internet users, and a great many apparently by adolescents with little or no aptitude at spelling, it would be easy for me to dismiss this, if there did not happen to be a history of reported ghost sightings in that very same location dating back more than a century. In fact, the "large white silhouettes" sound a great deal like those that used to be reported being seen all over this section of West Housatonic Street. According to an 1897 article I found in Pittsfield's Sunday Morning Call, a floating white silhouette was routinely seen by employees returning home at night from the Tillotson mill, which stood around where Osceola Street now runs. This apparition was often seen "dancing in the wind, teetering on the limb of some tree, or retreating mysteriously into the woods."

This ghost was apparently a refugee from what was once Pittsfield's most famous haunted house, Greenwood, or "the old Britton Place." While sources vary on the exact placement, it seems that the house probably stood on the hill on the south side of West Housatonic between Barker Road and what is now Britton Street. It was built shortly before 1850 by Thomas Britton, a retired sea captain, who moved there with his wife Elizabeth and his daughter Martha. Captain Britton named the house "Greenwood," his wife's maiden name. Their occupancy was marked by many festive parties, but was to prove short-lived. One later source mentions the story that a robbery took place there at some point, and some shots were fired, but it is not clear whether or not anyone was killed during this incident. What is clear from census records is that by 1860 Captain Britton was deceased, and his wife had gone on to live a few remaining years with another family. Their daughter may have married and left the state, though it is possible she too may have died before 1860.

In the decades that followed, the house became commonly known as the local haunted house, and according to one source, "hosts of interesting stories" were told about it. After the Brittons, there were no permanent residents in the house. Sometime in the 1880's, it was purchased by Thaddeus Clapp, who owned the Pontoosuc woolen mill. Clapp had the place renovated and occasionally spent summers there with his family. Finally, on April 12, 1890, the house burned to the ground, while the local fire department, unable to secure enough water, tried in vain to check the flames. According to the Pittsfield Sun, the cause of the fire was "a mystery," as the house was unoccupied at the time.

As near as I can tell, no photographs of Greenwood survive, but a partial description may be found in a historic piece of New England literature. A few sources have expressed the opinion that Oliver Wendell Holmes incorporated Greenwood into his description of Hyacinth Cottage in his novel Elsie Venner, a study of a girl whose sociopathic nature is caused by her mother having been bitten by a rattlesnake while she was in the womb. This seems a reasonable claim, as it is commonly thought that nearby South Mountain served as an inspiration for "The Mountain" in Holmes's novel, along with a story about rattlesnakes passed on to him by Professor Alonzo Clark while at Williams College. Certainly Holmes would have known of the Britton house, which was built and occupied during his time in Pittsfield; he may even have attended parties there. In the novel, Hyacinth Cottage was built by one "Major Rowena," recently deceased, as Captain Britton would have been at the time the novel was penned. Holmes describes it as "a pretty place enough, a little too much choked round with bushes, and too much overrun with climbing-roses, which, in the season of slugs and rose-bugs, were apt to show so brown about the leaves and so coleopterous about the flowers, that it might be questioned whether their buds and blossoms made up for these unpleasant animal combinations."

After the house was destroyed, ghostly encounters along West Housatonic Street became even more common. Many a night, it was said, its vaporous silhouette could be seen hovering over the bridge, racing along the train tracks, and finally retreating up to the top of the hill where the house had been. Once on the spot of its former residence, the ghost would set about "teetering up and down silently and uncannily, as if beckoning someone to come that way." Sometimes the manifestations proved so frightening that workers walking down that road at night would be overwhelmed, and run all the way back to the mill.

But what to make of the mention of "blood stained, almost ape-like fingerprints"? This does not appear to be the M.O. of the Britton place ghost at all. This bit of lore may in fact be a fragmented recollection of the dragon "Pitt". Pitt was a float created by General Electric for the 1950 Halloween Parade. As part of a publicity campaign, it was decided to slowly reveal hints of its existence, a press release was sent out claiming that huge claw tracks had been spotted in Clapp Park. This proved unnerving to many, and rather than risk a War of the Worlds -style panic, this approach was abandoned. It seems very possible to me that in the intervening half century, these alleged claw tracks may well have become rumors of bloody, "ape-like" prints.

As for the rest, who knows? Perhaps the same apparition that was seen so frequently a century ago continues to make occasional forays to its favorite spot. Is it Captain Britton, unable to let go of the place he chose to make his retirement home? Or perhaps his widow, returned after death to the place where a pleasant life of social affairs was cut short too soon? Impossible to say for sure, but I would counsel anyone walking down West Housatonic Street at night to keep half an eye out for a glimpse of the ghost of the "old Britton place."

Sources:

The Pittsfield Sun April 17, 1890

The Sunday Morning Call, November 28, 1897

Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Elsie Venner, 1861

Abbot, Katharine M. Old Paths and Legends of the New England Border Knickerbocker Press, 1907

The Berkshire Eagle, December 10, 1935

Berkshire Paranormal Conference

[A version of this article appeared in The Advocate Weekly]

In the past I have penned pieces on ghosts, psychics, and strange happenings in Berkshire County's history. Now I have the opportunity to announce a local event in the near future which comprises all of these elements: the Berkshire Paranormal Conference. The first of its kind, this conference and seminar is set to take place in North Adams at the Lafayette Greylock Masonic Lodge- also known as the Houghton Mansion- on July 15, 16 & 17.

Organized by the New England Ghost Project, based in Dracut, the conference promises to be quite an interesting affair including an array of lectures and activities. Speakers will include Rhode Island folklorist Michael Bell, whose book Food for the Dead, a study of New England vampire traditions, is one of my personal favorites; Jeff Belanger, author of The World's Most Haunted Places; and Karen Mossey, whose work in the area of Electronic Voice Phenomenon was featured in the recent film White Noise- just to name a couple. Conference attendees will also view a screening of the film The Bell Witch Haunting, based on one of the most famous American hauntings ever recorded. Activities will also deal directly with the strange goings on reported in the mansion itself, with tours of the facility and even a midnight seance conducted by Sean Portier of The Salem Witches. Two meals, a buffet at Steeples restaurant and a Sunday brunch at the mansion, are also included in the conference fees.

A bit of background is probably in order here. The Houghton Mansion was once the home of North Adam's first mayor, Albert C. Houston, and his family. Their life there was marred by tragedy early on, when Laura, one of their five daughters, died of a childhood illness. Then, on August 1, 1911, Albert Houghton and his daughter Mary, along with Mary's friend Sybil Hutton (a niece of North Adam's second mayor, H. Torrey Cady), set out to spend the day in Bennington. They were driven by John Widders, a servant who had been with the family since the 1870's. While climbing Pownal Center Hill, Widders had to pull around a stone sled being pulled by a team of horses. As he did so, the shoulder of the road gave out, and the car tumbled down the hill. Mary Houghton and Sybil Hutton were killed. Albert Houghton was brought home and treated for what were thought to be minor injuries, but passed on a few days late, on August 11. John Widders was unhurt but extremely emotional. The night Albert died, Widders excused himself, saying he was going to tend to the horses. He never returned. He was found in the cellar of the barn, having shot himself in the head with a horse pistol. Albert Houghton's widow lived out seven more sad and lonely years in the house, perishing in 1918.

It is thought by some that when events of sufficient tragedy occur, something may be left behind to linger around the place where such suffering took place. Whether this something is in fact some part of the spiritual essence of the deceased parties or some sort of "place memory" not yet explained by science, if such a thing is possible then the Houghton Mansion must surely be a candidate. Ever since the Masons acquired the property in 1920, there have been rumors of strange happenings in the building. According to David J. Pitkin's Ghosts of the Northeast, in 1993 three maintenance workers were taking a lunch break on the second floor when they heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. When they went to see who it was, there was no one there. They searched downstairs but there was no one else in the building. Apparently, this is not a unique occurrence, but has been reported a number of times over the years. Another strange event was reported by an accountant named Robin in 1994, who was working late in the building after a Masonic carnival fundraiser. A blast of icy air hit him and at that moment he felt someone pass behind him; but there was no one there.

Others have told of a range of unexplained phenomena, including loud banging on doors and walls, inexplicable cold spots in certain rooms, and intermittent problems using cell phones. The basement and the third floor seem to be particular trouble spots; strange voices have been heard in both areas. Some have reported seeing a light on from outside in an area on the third floor which has no working light, and of seeing someone through the window there when no one was in the building. The third floor, it should be noted, is where the servant's bedrooms were once located, and where John Widders would have slept throughout his time there.

I personally had an experience in the Houghton Mansion some years back which, while not supernatural, was utterly chilling, if only for the briefest of moments. After a rehearsal dinner there for my brother's wedding, myself and a couple of my brothers went to get a look at the rest of the building. Being seventeen at the time, with my head full of absurd anti-Masonic notions gleaned from dubious conspiracy theory books, my nerves were already slightly excited. Upon opening up one door, I let out a little gasp as my eyes beheld a variety of horrors, including what appeared to be an electric chair and assorted human body parts. After only a second or so my eyes focused properly and I realized I was looking at plastic props from some sort of Halloween party or "Haunted House" event.

In 2004, investigations of a less comic sort than mine were undertaken both by the New England Ghost Project and by Isis Paranormal Investigations, based in upstate New York. During the first investigation, wild temperature variations from within and without a perceived "cold spot", and unusual readings on a device for gauging electro-magnetic fluctuations were observed. As I have no real experience with this type of "ghost-hunting", and having not been present, I cannot comment on the reliability of these findings, but pass them along for what they are worth.
I can say that the Houghton Mansion, which has been called one of the Berkshire's "five most haunted places", seems a very appropriate venue for an event like this conference. Those interested should act quickly; conference registration is still open at this time, but is expected to fill up rapidly as July approaches.

For rates, and more information about planned speakers and activities, go to: www.neghostproject.nstemp.com/catalog.html

See also:

http://houghton-mansion.tripod.com/

Ghosts of the Northeast, by David J. Pitkin

The Age of Ghosts and Hobgoblins in Manchester

Court House, Manchester, Vermont- Photo Courtesy of Jared Benedict


When one thinks of spring, one tends to think of spring cleaning, setting the clocks back, and maybe even pulling out a couple of pairs of shorts from the bottom of the drawer. Occasionally, however, when the snow melts, and the sun begins working overtime hours, it reveals more than just chapped lawns and some misplaced squirrel food. Sometimes, just sometimes, when the spring sets in, it reveals old bones, and old mysteries.

Such was the case in Manchester, Vermont in April of 1819. That was the year Amos Boorn, a farmer in East Manchester, saw a ghost. That sighting, and the events that transpired in its wake, would lead to a most fascinating chapter in Vermont's legal history, and an enduring mystery.

Before we look too closely at this happening, we should go back a bit and explore the events which paved the way for this apparition to appear. The exact nature of those events has been a matter of great debate ever since, but the core of facts which almost everyone seems to agree upon is the following: On May 10, 1812, Russell Colvin was seen clearing rocks from a field owned by his father-in-law, Barney Boorn. He was in the company of his son Lewis and his two brother-in-laws, Stephen and Jesse Boorn. According to some later witness testimony, an argument seemed to be transpiring between Colvin and the two Boorns. Following this, Russell was not seen again in Manchester. He was thought to have wandered off during the altercation, a possibility which the residents of Manchester (those who bothered to take notice at all) found perfectly plausible, given that Colvin was considered "half-witted" by most and was known to have left town for weeks or months in the past.

It was not until seven years later that people began to seriously question this assumption. When they finally did, it was in large part due to the appearance of a ghost.

In April of 1819, Amos Boorn, who was Stephen and Jesse's uncle, told of a dream in which the ghost of Russell Colvin stood beside his bed. Colvin's shade told him that he'd been murdered and that he wanted to show him where his body was buried. He lead Amos to an old cellar hole in a field which had previously belonged to Barney Boorn. Not to be dismissed lightly, this dream occurred not once but three times in all.

Though Amos's dreams were to become one of the major catalysts for the events which followed, it had not appeared entirely out of the blue. Rather, a small handful of neighbors and relatives had grown suspicious in recent months, due to vaguely sinister comments that had been made offhand, mostly by Stephen Boorn, who had moved to Denmark, New York two years earlier but had returned for a visit. Stephen had told one acquaintance that he and Jesse had put Colvin "where potatoes would not freeze." Something similar had also been stated or implied by Nathaniel Boorn, another uncle, to Amos in the form of a death-bed confession. It was shortly after this that Amos had his ghostly dreams. So soon after, in fact, that some sources have suggested that the dreams were fabricated as a way for Amos to put forth his suspicions without overtly accusing his nephews of murder.

Whatever their nature, when word began to circulate about Amos's dreams, other Machesterites began having, as one source puts it, "strange dreams and unaccountable visions." Samuel Putnam Waldo, a lawyer from Hartford, wrote that it seemed "as if the age of ghosts and hobgoblins had revived; and that every house was haunted by the ghost of Colvin," and furthermore that this ghost "seemed to have had, if possible, a more serious effect upon the minds of the people, than that of the King of Denmark upon Hamlet."

At the point where the spectral dreams had reached critical mass, particularly in the more rural East Manchester, town officials in Manchester village began to take note, and eventually arrested Jesse Boorn on April 7, while a Court of Inquiry was convened to investigate whether or not a crime had been committed. The following day the investigators headed out to the cellar hole where Amos had been directed in his dream. Digging there produced several small objects: a coat-button, two knives (a long jackknife and a small pen knife). Some bones were found, but these proved not to be human remains. The objects were taken to Russell's wife Sarah, (who, it should be added, had already voiced an interest in having Russell declared dead, having another child, who under Vermont law was only eligible for support from the father if the mother was unmarried or widowed.), and she identified them as belonging to Russell.

Nevertheless, with the bones found proving to be of animal origin, the inquiry was left with little beside some refuse from an old cellar hole. In the minds of many inhabitants of East Manchester, guilt had already been determined, largely on the basis of the spectral dreams of Amos Boorn and others. The Manchester village elite who were the legal authority in this matter were adamant that such "ghost stories" be left out of the issue entirely.

So, by Saturday, May 1, with naught but rumors and circumstantial evidence that a crime might have been committed, town officials were prepared to free Jesse Boorn when Thomas Jefferson, a farmer who claimed to have witnessed the Boorns feuding with Colvin on the day he was last seen, asked to speak with Jesse in his jail cell. What was said is unknown, but when he emerged Jesse hastily confessed that he believed Stephen may have killed Colvin. He added that he thought he had an idea "within a few rods of where Colvin was buried."

This revelation lead to a new search, which ultimately revealed nothing. Meanwhile, in another part of Manchester, a boy discovered a cache of bones in the hollow of an old stump. This generated a great deal of excitement, but once more, upon close examination these too appeared to be animal bones. However, with Jesse's statement in hand, the matter of a corpus delicti was no longer so crucial. Some men were dispatched to New York to arrest Stephen Boorn and bring him to Manchester. He came willingly enough, but protested his innocence when pressed to confess the murder
Once back in Manchester, Stephen was first placed in a separate cell; then, hoping that putting the two together would provoke a full admission, hew was moved in with Jesse. Having quite the opposite of the desired effect, Jesse promptly rescinded his earlier statement.

The rage and indignation of the people of Manchester was by this time very intense. Amos Boorn's dreams, in particular, were accepted as "confirmation strong as holy writ," according to contemporary source. Still, the town officials close to the case knew that the case against the brothers, now united, was far from perfect. What followed, then, over the course of the long summer they spent sitting in their cell, was that virtually everyone involved took a turn at badgering, cajoling, and even threatening the brothers into a full confession.

Finally, after what some sources have termed coercion, Stephen offered a confession, that he had in fact killed Colvin. In his account, however, Jesse was not even present, leading later scholars to wonder if he may just have been trying to secure the release of his brother. He later tried to retract this confession, as had Jesse with his, but by this time it was too late. The machinery of law was in motion.

The trial for murder, at least the official one, was carried out in October of 1819. The Boorns, who pleaded not guilty, were represented by Richard Skinner, along with his associate Leonard Sargeant, who later served as Lt. Governor of Vermont. All prospective jurors from Manchester and from neighboring Sunderland were dismissed, due to the intense prejudice that had developed against the Boorns (so intense, in fact, that their mother, Elizabeth Boorn, was excommunicated from the Baptist church).

The trial itself proceeded quickly, from Tuesday, October 27, to Saturday, October 31 (the date of its conclusion if of course ironic, given the supernatural undertones of the entire affair). Despite a brilliantly executed defense by Skinner and Sergeant, the Boorns were, perhaps inevitably, convicted, and sentenced to death. Skinner called the trial "an instance of those strange popular delusions, which sometimes sweep through the most intelligent and conscientious communities, subverting truth and reason and justice." The sentence seemed particularly severe, especially in Jesse's case, and is an indicator of how intense the anti-Boorn sentiment had become.

Sympathetic to their plight, his attorney's circulated a petition for clemency. At the same time, a novel idea occurred to them: what if Russell Colvin was really alive, and could be found? If the Boorns had indeed not killed him, this seemed very possible. With this in mind, they purchased advertisements in papers throughout the northeast, seeking information from anyone, along with a detailed description. It went out about two months before the brothers were due to be hanged.

As the weeks passed, it eventually made its way to New York City, where it was seen by two crucial individuals. One was Taber Chadwick, a visiting Methodist minister from New Jersey, who after mulling it over a few days, wrote to the newspaper that he believed he knew the man in question and that he was alive and well in New Jersey. The second, as fate would have it, was Manchester expatriate and New York City tavern owner by the name of James Whelpley. When he saw Chadwick's letter, he sprung into action. He found the preacher, who told him that the man he believed to be Colvin worked for his brother-in-law, William Polhemus. Whelpley hired a wagon and made haste to Polhemus's mill, in what was then Monmouth County, New Jersey. When he found Polhemus, he was told that he did have a man from Vermont working for him, who had originally given his name as Russell Colvin before changing it, and that this man was "mildly deranged" ("slow", in today's parlance). Whelpley met the man, and knew at once that this was indeed Colvin. Securing Polhemus's permission, Whelpley took Colvin by stage coach to Vermont. They arrived in Bennington on December 22, to great crowds of spectators. Though somewhat confused, Russell addressed several people he knew there by name. All in Bennington were unanimous- this was indeed the man thought dead, standing before their very eyes!

Days before their arrival, word had reached Manchester, and was met with great skepticism and even consternation. Stephen Boorn, when told the news, seemed the most shocked of all, declaring that "had Colvin made his appearance right then, it would have caused immediate death." When finally the stage coach did reach Manchester, it was greeted by a mob - nearly every man, woman and child in town had come to see this man "returned from the dead."

Colvin greeted all he knew immediately by name, and seemed confused by all the fuss. When Stephen was allowed to make his way through the crowd, Colvin stared at him, finally asking why he was in chains. "Because they say I murdered you," Stephen replied. "You never hurt me," said Colvin. "Jesse struck me with a briar once, but it did not hurt me much." Colvin stayed in town for a week, during which time nearly everyone from Manchester, as well as people from neighboring towns, stopped and spoke to him. All were convinced that, both in appearance and behavior, was the missing man. Even his wife, Sally, knew him- though he was cold and aloof at her visit, and said to have muttered "that is all over with."

For legal purposes, he was asked to undergo an official examination to definitively prove his identity. The examination, run by the state's attorney who had prosecuted the Boorns, went smoothly and without incident. According to Leonard Sargeant, Colvin "told so many little incidents that could not have been known to an imposter [sic], however well posted, that there could be no doubt in the mind of any rational person as to the identity of the man."

On December 29, Colvin left Manchester for the last time. He made final appearance in Albany, before returning to New Jersey, at which point he becomes lost to history. What may have become of him after this is totally unknown. Stephen and Jesse were, of course, released. Both sued the state for damages and lost. Stephen returned to New York and Jesse moved to Ohio. Ever since then, the case has occupied a place of interest in the legal annals, held up as a classic case of wrongful conviction due to community prejudice and superstition. But was it?

In his book The Counterfeit Man, UMASS historian Gerald McFarland makes a case for the possibility that the "Russell Colvin" which appeared in Manchester in December of 1819 was actually a paid imposter. The basis for his argument, however, seems even more circumstantial than the evidence which convicted the Boorns to begin with. It relies on a conspiracy of no less than five people, and perhaps more: Barney Boorn, their father, and potentially other Boorns to help finance it, along with James Whelpley, Taber Chadwick (a Methodist minister, remember), William Polhemus, and the impersonator himself. It would also necessitate that these conspirators locate someone who not only so closely resembled Colvin that after only seven years no one would notice, and who could be so meticulously coached that he could supply on demand virtually any information Russell could be expected to know. Finally, all this would have had to have been accomplished in about two weeks time. Personally, I find the idea that such an enterprise could be pulled off so smoothly, secretively, and in such short order, harder to swallow than the original ghost story. After all, I think Jamie Foxx deserved every ounce of his Oscar, but even I knew that he wasn't actually Ray Charles (and I'm one who is prone to credulity and to flights of pure imagination- or so they tell me). Then again, ours is a world of strange incongruities and unlikely events- I rule nothing out.

In the end, it seems, we are left with a persistent shroud of mystery over the whole affair. Was it really Russell Colvin who appeared at the last moment in Manchester? Or was it indeed all a con to save the Boorns from the gallows?

Or was it, in fact, Colvin's ghost, having now forgiven even his own death, sweeping through town for one last incredible finale?

Sources:

Hard, Walter; Greene, Janet. Mischief in the Mountains: Strange Tales of Vermont and Vermonters
McFarland, Gerald. The Counterfeit Man: The true story of the Boorn-Colvin Murder Case
"Old Mystery Revived." Brookyln Daily Eagle, August 3, 1860

"Strange Murder Case." Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec 8, 1895

The Bizarre Berkshires

http://www.iberkshires.com/story.php?story_id=15903

Bizarre Berkshires: tales spooky and otherwise
By Joe Durwin
The Advocate Weekly- October, 27 2004

Most residents of Berkshire County know that nestled in the scenic wooded hills of Western Massachusetts is an area heavily steeped in history and culture.

But it should also perhaps not come as too much of a surprise that a place that has been host to such wild imaginations as those of Herman Melville, Edith Wharton and even Nathaniel Hawthorne should also be quite rich in odd stories, anomalies, and downright bizarre lore. Some of it goes back centuries; other tales have surfaced quite recently.

In the early days of our nation, the town of Cheshire was well known for its delicious cheese. So when Thomas Jefferson was elected president in 1800, Elder John Leland, pastor of Cheshire’s Baptist Church and a passionate supporter of Jefferson’s anti-Federalist politics, proposed to the people of Cheshire that a massive wheel of cheese be made to send to the new president as a gift. Leland found considerable local support for this idea, and farmers donated an impressive yield to the effort, resulting finally in a wheel estimated to be roughly 900 pounds.

The cheese was stored at the cider mill of one Captain Brown, in preparation for shipping. Now, at the same time, according to legend, there lived on Mount Greylock an old Indian medicine man by the name of Hokaposset. This old shaman was viewed with much trepidation by locals, who attributed vast powers to him, including the power to kill a stag merely by pointing a rifle at it and to cause mysterious deaths to befall his enemies. The old native sorcerer, as the story goes, had but one living relative, his granddaughter, Shonoma, also known as “Humming Bird.” Humming Bird was much in love with, and loved by, a local boy by the name of Ichabod Rannolds. But Pastor Leland advised the boy’s mother to forbid the match.

When Ichabod, a dutiful son, broke the bad news to Humming Bird, she became furious. She warned him of her grandfather’s powers and that he would cause suffering to those who caused pain to his only granddaughter. Ichabod did not relent, and the next day, Pastor Leland was shocked when one of his deacons brought him some bad news from Captain Brown — the entire cheese wheel had disappeared! Ichabod, suspecting the culprit to be the old shaman, went with some other men to the mountain to confront him, but when they arrived, Humming Bird said her grandfather was very ill and was indeed near death. She begged him to leave and let him die in peace. Hokaposset, who was indeed quite sick, died that very night. That morning, when Captain Brown opened the door of his cider mill, he was shocked to see that the cheese wheel, completely intact, had mysteriously reappeared!

While that story is more than a little amusing, more sinister “vanishings” have occasionally been known to happen in the area. In fact, Charles Fort, perhaps the most famous of all chroniclers of strange happenings, makes note of one such strange disappearance in, or over, the Berkshire Hills. According to a story in The New York Times, a pilot by the name of Captain Mansell R. James, took off from Lee on May 29, on route to Mitchel Field in Long Island, and was not seen again. Search parties scoured the area, and later, on the 4th of June, Army planes arrived to continue the search. Despite these and other efforts, not to mention much media attention, no trace was ever found of Captain James.

But the Berkshires have not only been the scene of strange disappearances; occasionally, things appear that ought not. A notable example is Pittsfield’s “ghost train,” which was seen by a number of persons at the Bridge Lunch diner, including its owner, John Quirk, one afternoon in February 1958. The train, as described by every person present that day, consisted of a steam locomotive and half a dozen cars, speeding down the tracks under North Street Bridge toward Boston. A month later, the train was seen again by every customer during a busy breakfast at the Bridge Lunch. Again the description was consistent from all witnesses: a steam engine with several cars, which appeared solid and clear as day. Railway officials maintained that no steam train had traveled those tracks in years, and when the train was sighted yet again, the railroad firmly stated that no train whatsoever was using those tracks at the time.

Another example of objects appearing apparently “out of nowhere,” can be found in reports of strange goings-on in the vicinity of Sage’s Ravine in Sheffield. At the time, Simeon Sage owned a garment manufacturing shop on his property, and it was here that, according to historical accounts, a series of bombardments that might today be called a “poltergeist,” occurred.

On the night of Nov. 8, 1802, as the accounts have it, an old man and two boys were in the shop. Shortly after 10 p.m., with the boys already in bed and the old man himself preparing to retire for the night, they were suddenly all given a jolt as a large chunk of wood crashed through the window. Pieces of mortar followed it. Terrified, they ran to get Mr. Sage. When he arrived on the scene, various objects continued to crash against the building. Sage could see the windows breaking, but try as he might, he could not discern where the objects were coming from. Then suddenly, the hail of miscellaneous missiles ceased. But about 8 the next night, it promptly started up again and continued on until midnight, when it again stopped abruptly. This strange bombardment occurred again the next night. While all three nights the torrent of objects occurred after dark, on the fourth day it began an hour before sunset. It continued for an hour in broad daylight, but even as those present searched the area around the building, they still could not find the source. Then, after an hour, it stopped once again — but this time it began again, almost immediately, at the Landon house, a quarter of a mile away on the Sheffield-Washington line. Rocks pelted the house for hours before abating, only to begin again around breakfast time the next morning.

By this time, word had spread of these events, and a steady stream of onlookers began showing up, including clergymen. None could discern the source of the mischief. Though many witnesses were themselves pelted with objects, some in broad daylight, all swore that they could not see the objects or their trajectory until after they struck. The possibility of a single assailant handy with a slingshot seemed to be eliminated, since the shower of refuse sometimes struck the buildings from several directions at once. The Sage place was hit with a variety of ammunition, including pieces of wood, stones, charcoal and a strange kind of mortar that did not resemble any to be found in the neighborhood. The Landon house was bombarded only by stones.

The phenomenon continued through the night of November 13, then ended for good. In total, 38 panes of glass were destroyed at the Sage’s and 13 at the Landon’s. No culprit was ever determined.

Those are not the only mysterious objects that have been reported whizzing through the Berkshire skies. I have collected no less than 10 reports of UFOs sighted throughout the county, over a period that spans from 1908 to 2003. In the interest of brevity, I will only share a couple: In 1981, a Pittsfield man was walking his dog when he suddenly felt a strange sensation pass over him. Looking up at the night sky, he saw the stars blacked out by a very large triangular object. Orange light glowed from beneath it. He described this sighting as having a strange effect on him. Rather than panicking or even thinking of it as odd, he felt very calm and simply pulled his dog’s leash and continued walking. Only later did the strange nature of the experience occur to him.

In another, more recent case, four witnesses in Becket reported seeing three disc-shaped objects with flashing white and red lights over Greenwater Pond. They were hovering and chasing each other across the pond and continued doing so for nearly 45 minutes before disappearing.

For some reason, sightings such as this frequently take place on or around mountains. Both Mount Greylock and October Mountain have yielded reports of strange aerial objects, but I will save those for another time, for both of these mountains have also been the scene of even more interesting sightings of the bizarre. In August 1983, The Berkshire Eagle reported on such a case. Two Pittsfield men, Eric Durant, and Frederick Parody, told reporters they had been recreating near Camp Eagle, a former Boy Scout retreat, when they saw a strange creature in the woods. The two men first spotted it in the moonlight when they heard noises not far from their campsite and went to investigate. Later, as they were leaving, they caught a glimpse of it in their headlights, lurking behind some bushes. What they described was a dark brown, hairy creature, which stood erect about 6 or 7 feet tall. They also claimed it had glowing red eyes, but this could have been due to the reflection of the headlights. What the Eagle did not know, however, was that an adult leader of a local Boy Scout troop told me that he and one of the Scouts also caught a brief glimpse of a similar creature while hiking on October Mountain that same weekend. He remembered that it was the same weekend because of the media attention brought on by the other two men’s sighting. Another person made a report of a similar hairy biped seen near the top of this same mountain to the Bigfoot Field Research Organization. This creature, which the informant claimed to have seen in the summer of 1989, appeared to be carrying and stacking stones in the brush.

I have heard more than half a dozen reputable verbal accounts of similar sightings from wooded areas all over the Berkshires — and, if that doesn’t satisfy you that an unknown creature haunts our forests, I’ve heard dozens more dis-reputable accounts! Nor is this a recent development. In fact, a piece in the New York Times dated Oct. 18, 1879, reported a “Wild Man” about 5 feet tall, covered in hair, seen by two young Vermont men hunting “in the mountains south of Williamstown.” The men were so frightened, the Times reported, that they dropped their guns and ammunition in their hasty retreat and never dared to go back for them.

Mount Greylock, it seems, may be home to an even more esoteric entity. He is known as the “Old Coot,” and is sometimes seen wandering up the mountain near the trail that runs through the Bellows Pipe area. As the story goes, the ‘Coot’ is the astral remnant (or should I say revenant?) of a man named Bill Saunders, who lived in Adams nearly a century and a half ago. Saunders left his wife and child to fight in the Union Army. A year later, his wife received word that he had been badly wounded and was in a field hospital. When, after many months passed, she heard nothing more of him, she assumed him to be lost. She hired a local man to help work the farm. Eventually they married. Then, after the war had ended, Saunders returned, only to find another man had taken his place. Devastated, he spent the rest of his life living as a hermit in a small shack in Bellows Pipe. Many years later, hunters discovered him dead in his cabin but were mystified to see a strange man-shaped shadow dart out of the shack and into the woods, heading up the mountain. Ever since, hunters and hikers have reported seeing a shadowy, bedraggled form walking through the woods up Mount Greylock.

Twice, the North Adams Transcript has published photographs alleged to be of the “Coot,” one by Randy Trabold, in 1939, the second by Richard Lodge in 1979. The Lodge photograph seems to depict a tall, dark, man-like form walking through the woods with his head hung low. Was this the ghost of Bill Saunders?

The Berkshires can also boast a few more high-profile manifestations. Indeed, specters are said to haunt two of the county’s most prominent cultural tourist locations. In Lenox, it is said that Edith Wharton still inhabits the The Mount, the beautiful Estate she had built in 1902. Visitors sometimes tell of strange noises, including the laughter of a woman, thought to be Wharton herself. Shakespeare & Company, the esteemed theater troupe for whom The Mount is home, frequently reports footsteps made by invisible feet and the appearance of various apparitions, including Henry James, who is thought to keep his friend Wharton company there. Elsewhere in Lenox, a ghostly occupant is said to inhabit the Highwood Manor House on the scenic grounds of Tanglewood. It is thought that this spirit may be the shade of Oreb Andrews, who died on the grounds in 1822 and was awakened in 1986, when workmen disturbed a memorial marker. Doors opening and closing and water faucets turning themselves on and off are among the unexplained activities attributed to this restless soul. Some have speculated that it was perhaps this being that appeared in front of Leonard Bernstein, prompting him to leap from a window seat in shock. John Williams even joined a band of ghost hunters to pursue this personage, if such a word applies, but they were unable to catch a glimpse of their quarry. Odd occurrences, though infrequent, continue to this day.

Perhaps most disturbing are the reports that have reached this writer regarding Springside Park and the surrounding area. Many Pittsfield locals will recall the grisly rashes of “vandalism” — as the Eagle euphemistically put it — which took place at the petting zoo in the ’70s and ’80s, in which a number of animals were mutilated and killed, finally leading to its closing in 1984. But few recall that, in the late 19th century, the dismembered torso of a human corpse was found not far from the Springside House, then called the Elmhurst House. The body was never identified and the killer never apprehended, but the crime may have left some lasting residue on the area. A local woman of exceedingly solid character shared with me the story of how, some decades ago, she and her boyfriend were walking down the circular drive of Springside House when what they then thought to be an uprooted tree stump suddenly began lumbering toward them. Later, when they heard of the murder, they speculated that it might actually have been the hands and feet of the unfortunate victim. And reports have continued to trickle in over the years of a horrific floating head, which has been seen by many residents of the west side of North Street, across the street from the Springside house. “The Head,” as it is often called, is usually described as a ghastly skull with bits of decomposed skin still clinging to it. It is interesting to note that these houses stand on land that was once a landfill.

These are but a smattering of some of my favorite tales of the bizarre originating in the Berkshires. There are many more, including the oft-repeated story of Hoosac Tunnel’s “Bloody Pit,” the tragic Indian lovers who are sometime seen canoeing across Pontoosuck Lake, the menacing apparition said to inhabit the Eagle building, the grim Chauffeur who haunts the old Houghton Mansion in North Adams, a spectral woman who wanders Hinsdale’s Walsh Camp, Egremont’s undead Hessian soldier, bizarre happenings in Lenox’s High Point and many, many others. It is said that some areas produce more than their fair share of paranormal encounters, and Berkshire County certainly seems to be one such place. Whether it is due to some kind of eldritch magic, misunderstood electromagnetic phenomena or simply a kind of geographical favoritism on the part of supernatural creatures, these legends, like the beings they portray, are likely to live on evermore — in our hearts and in our cultural heritage.