The World of Lore: Dreadful Places

by Aaron Mahnke

  He was a fugitive from the crown, and even though the Massachusetts colony was thousands of miles away from King Charles, it was a land full of loyalists. There was always the risk that someone would recognize him or hear his story and then turn him over to the authorities. Goffe had to hide, and stay hidden, for the rest of his life. No more public life. No more political influence. Exposure meant death now.

  William Goffe had been living secretly in the cellar of a home in Hadley for over a decade when the people of the village gathered that June day in 1676 for prayer and fasting. I like to imagine there was a moment that day when he realized—for the first time in forever—there was no one around to see him. Maybe he risked a trip outside to feel the sun and wind against his face. And maybe it was while doing that—smiling up at the sky and taking it all in—that he saw the enemy approaching.

  However he discovered the ambush, we know what he did next. He burst into the meetinghouse and warned them all. He became the military leader of his youth and led them in defense of the village. He showed them how to fire the cannon. In his seventies, far from home, with a price on his head, William Goffe became a hero.

  This is how folklore works. It delivers truth, filtered through the lens of time and edited by the political views and social climate of the times. The stories we inherit—tales that we pick up and share with each other over the years—aren’t new and shiny. They’re antiques, tarnished by the years and incomplete.

  The stranger who saved Hadley in 1676 was just a man, not an angelic visitor. But William Goffe took on great risk to warn the people of the approaching danger. He risked exposure and execution. He risked his safety and secrecy. He risked his life. I wonder if any of us could be brave enough to do the same, given the chance.

  Maybe there was an angel in Hadley that day after all.

  AT 2:00 A.M. on February 5, 1887, the Montreal Express was working its way up the cold iron nervous system of the North American railroad network. It had pulled out of Boston hours before and was weaving its way beside the Connecticut River along the New Hampshire–Vermont borders.

  That’s a lot of geography, I know. Just know this: the Montreal Express was a daily passenger train that ran back and forth between Boston and, you guessed it, Montreal.

  This time, though, the train was running behind schedule. Nearly an hour behind, and it hadn’t even left Vermont yet. They had a long, cold journey ahead of them. But as planned, the train pulled into the White River Junction railway station and stopped for passengers to enter and exit the cars.

  When it pulled away minutes later, it was nearly -20°. Each of the passenger cars had small wood-burning stoves, but they struggled to fight off the creeping chill in the air. Everyone on board—seventy-nine passengers and six crewmen—bundled up against the cold and did their best to keep their minds off it.

  As the train pulled away from the station, a conductor by the name of Smith Sturtevant walked up and down the aisles collecting tickets. Minutes later, as the tracks crossed the White River on the longest wooden railroad bridge in America at the time, the train gave a shudder. One of the crew, sensing something was wrong, reached for a bell cable and gave it a yank, signaling to the engineer to stop the train.

  But you don’t stop a train that quickly. That’s a lot of weight, and a lot of momentum, and while the speed dropped rapidly, the train kept moving across the bridge. As it did, one of the sleeper cars snagged on a piece of railway track that had broken due to the cold. And when it did, the car veered away from the rest of the train, and plummeted sixty feet into the river below.

  That car was joined by the three other cars behind it, and as it fell, they followed it down. Not to the rushing waters of the White River, though. No, with temperatures as low as they were, the river itself was frozen solid. It was as if the train had dropped onto pavement, or solid stone.

  The woodstoves and oil lamps exploded inside the train cars, and within moments everything was a raging firestorm. And those flames licked up the support legs of the bridge, and minutes later it too dropped into the gorge, landing right on top of the train.

  Five of the six crewmen died that night. Of the seventy-nine passengers, thirty of them perished. Most were burned to death in the fire. Some were crushed by the train or the bridge. A few even drowned as the heat of the flames melted the ice. According to one local paper, only eight of the bodies they recovered were identifiable.

  Those who were rescued were transported across the river to a farmhouse, where the injured and dying filled up the house so quickly that the rest were moved to the barn. Rescuers found Sturtevant, the conductor, and were able to pull him to safety. He died the next day. A woman named Maria Sadler, who’d been returning home to Quebec, was also found alive and pulled free, although her ankle was broken in the process. She, thankfully, survived.

  When they found Edward Dillon, he was alive and uninjured but pinned beneath a pile of debris. Heavy objects lay across his chest—a wheel from the train car, a thick timber, seats—and try as they might, the rescuers weren’t able to lift the weight of it all in order to free him.

  Dillon, to his credit, stayed calm and chatted with the crew, but then he turned his head and his eyes went wide. The fire that was consuming the train was slowly creeping toward his location. He begged. He pleaded. And the rescuers doubled their efforts, trying to dig him free. But it was no use: the debris was simply too heavy to move.

  When the first of the flames reached him, he cried out one final time. And then he closed his eyes. The twenty or so men who had been trying to free him could do nothing more than step back and watch in horror as Dillon burned to death, right before their eyes.

  He wasn’t the only one to burn to death, either. David Maigret, from Quebec, was also pinned beneath debris near the fire. When it approached, he pulled his pocket watch and wallet out and handed them to his young son Joseph, and then said his farewells before the wall of fire surrounded him as well.

  TODAY

  Today locals still whisper about the ghostly figure of a man in a conductor’s uniform who’s been seen walking along the tracks. He’s only ever seen at night, and only near the river. Maybe Smith Sturtevant has returned to help with the rescue efforts, and he’s just never left.

  The farmhouse across the river has survived, but not without some baggage. It’s said that so much blood soaked into the floorboards of the second floor that the stains can still be found on the ceiling of the kitchen. Another rumor says that animals refuse to go inside the old barn. The farm, by the way, was known by the family name: Paine.

  And although the old wooden bridge has been replaced by a more modern one, the original abutments are still there. But the locals will tell you that more than just stone has survived.

  According to some, the area surrounding the bridge still has a smell. Many who have traveled across the bridge have caught the scent and have described it as a mixture of burnt wood and something else. Something less common than the cool New England air. Something less pleasant than the autumn leaves.

  It’s the smell, they say, of charred human remains.

  JONATHAN BUCK WAS born in 1719 and grew up in the town of Haverhill, in the northern part of Massachusetts. That meant that he grew into adulthood before America declared independence from British rule, but it also meant that he got to be part of the initial expansion into Maine.

  Most people don’t know it, but for a long while, Maine was nothing more than a district of Massachusetts. It wasn’t until 1820 that the territory was granted statehood, though Jonathan was long dead by then. But in the 1760s, he sailed up the coast between Rockland and Bar Harbor as part of a survey team and helped establish six individual plantations, areas of settlement that would eventually become towns. In 1762, though, it was a difficult task to plant new communities so far north. There were Native Americans who felt threatened by the expansion of the coloni
als, and rightly so. Later on, the British would also put up a fight.

  Fifteen years later, the American Revolution would pit the colonies against the crown, and while the majority of the war was fought in places we easily recognize, some of the conflict found its way north to Maine. Like most wars, this one managed to come home. And home, for Jonathan Buck at least, was the location affectionately called Plantation No. 1.

  In July 1779, Buck joined a group of soldiers who were headed south toward the coast to lay siege to the British hidden away inside Fort George. A handful of frontiersmen was no match for the garrison of troops there, though, and the colonists were defeated. But they had succeeded at doing something else: they’d kicked a hornet’s nest.

  Buck knew it, too. The moment he got home, he packed his family up and they fled north, up the river to Brewer. Once he was sure they were safe, he walked south. Over two hundred miles, in fact, step by step toward his hometown of Haverhill. And he did this while he was sixty years old. Not too shabby, I’d say.

  Five years later, he led his family back to the ruined remains of Plantation No. 1 and began rebuilding, and this time it appeared to stick. His adult sons began to take a role in the community, and things blossomed. By the time Buck passed away in 1795, Plantation No. 1 had a new name: Bucksport.

  But not all was well in Bucksport. The legend says that a few years before his death, Jonathan Buck oversaw the execution of a woman in town. Some stories say that she had been accused of witchcraft, while others paint a darker tale. They say that the woman was his mistress and she was pregnant with his child. In either case, Buck had the woman burned at the stake to stop her.

  Both stories agree on one thing, though: there was a curse. As the flames began to climb up the kindling and flicker around her, the woman was said to have cried out that Buck would soon die as well. She predicted that once a tombstone was placed over his grave, something odd would happen: she would place her mark on it.

  Some stories say that once the fire had consumed her, one of her legs broke free and tumbled into the dirt in front of the onlookers. It’s a vivid image, and one that I can easily see being recreated in a film, or in an episode of Supernatural. But sadly, it’s all most likely a lie.

  You see, Jonathan Buck had no authority to execute a prisoner. And the last witch executions in America took place in Salem in 1692, a century before the story was said to have taken place. There are no records of the event, no documents or historical proof. Just the story.

  Well, that’s not true. There’s a bit more than just a story. There’s also the tombstone. You see, Jonathan Buck’s grandchildren finally erected a stone monument over his grave in 1852. It was in honor of the founder of Bucksport, and to pay respect to a beloved ancestor. But it also set the stage for something strange to happen.

  A mark appeared on the stone. It was a patch that seemed ever so slightly darker than the rest. People have tried to remove it, but it won’t come off. It’s not a stain or a manmade mark. It’s just an eerie shape embedded in the very color of the stone monument. And of course, it’s probably the source of the legend.

  Why? Because the mark on Jonathan Buck’s tombstone looks an awful lot like a leg.

  JUST TO THE north of Boston is a city nearly as old. Malden, Massachusetts, was settled just a decade after Boston was, all the way back in 1640. Thanks to the Mystic River, which separates it from Somerville and Boston to the south, locals referred to Malden for a very long time as simply “the Mistick Side.”

  The Sandy Bank Burial Ground there next to the Malden River welcomed its first long-term resident around 1648, and many followed after that. People were dying to get in, I guess you could say. But if you try to picture the graveyard in your mind, don’t arrange it in neat and tidy rows, like the cemeteries of our modern world. It’s a little bit crooked, a little bit ancient, and a little bit creepy.

  And maybe that’s to be expected for a graveyard situated on “the Mistick Side.”

  According to local legend, at least one of the burial ground’s occupants had trouble staying put. In the 1700s, there was apparently a man in town who loved to experiment with chemicals in his home laboratory. Neighbors often complained of the noxious smells that drifted out of his windows, and more than a few passersby choked on the fumes.

  As neighbors are so very good at doing, they complained about the chemist. Not that the man himself cared, mind you. In his view, he’d been doing true scientific work, and all of that effort had finally paid off. So when his last moments of life came a few years later, he made a chilling prediction to the few who had gathered around his deathbed.

  “In my life,” he told them, “I have differed from other men. And by the foul fiend I will continue different after I am dead. My flesh is not common flesh, like yours. It will never rot.”

  It was a cryptic thing to say because there are so many possible meanings. He could have been suggesting that he would never truly die. Or maybe that his corpse would refuse to rot and decay like the rest of humanity. Either way, it was a bold declaration from a man that everyone wished would just go away. In his own way, he was telling them all to not hold their breath.

  But he did die, and was soon buried in his family tomb. It’s the sort that you might imagine in an old horror film, where a stone chamber is built into the side of a hill, buried in soil, and accessible only by an iron door. His coffin was placed inside, and the neighborhood released a collective sigh of relief. It was nice to breathe easy again, after all.

  The legend doesn’t give a reason, but some years later a medical student crept into the cemetery and broke into the old man’s tomb. He’d heard the stories from others in town, and that had made him wonder. Had the old man’s prediction come true? And if so, how?

  When he got inside, he found that the old man’s corpse had indeed refused to decay. No rot, no peeling flesh, no putrefaction. It had, though, turned brown, and—according to this medical student—rather hard. Whatever chemicals the old man had exposed himself to, they’d done the trick. His body had refused to rot.

  Wanting to know why, this medical student is said to have taken a bone saw from his bag and then slowly, methodically, removed the old man’s head. With the pale light of the flickering lantern behind him, he gripped his trophy by the hair and began to lower it into a sack. And that’s when he heard the voice.

  It was as if someone else was in the cold chamber with him, whispering softly in the corner. He turned toward the sound, but nothing was there. Nothing, that is, except for the other coffins.

  But rather than fade away, the sounds grew. Whispers became moans, then wails, and then horrific cries. Shadows began to swirl through the chamber, around and above him, some black as night and others a sickly green. All of it was enough to frighten the man out of his mind.

  He tossed the head on the floor of the chamber and bolted through the open door into the night, heading home as fast as his legs could carry him. And with that, the episode ended.

  Months passed. Sometimes neighborhood children would cautiously push the iron door open slightly, and then squeal at the vision of the severed head sitting on the chamber floor. Even by the light of the noonday sun, it was a frightful experience—one that was hard to forget, and even harder to keep private. As a result, word spread.

  That’s the power of folklore, after all. It spreads like a low-burning fire, consuming rational thought and filling a community with a feeling of wonder, or horror, or dread. It rarely lets go once it’s taken hold of you. In fact, given enough time, folklore can build up quite a head of steam. And the story of the old chemist is one of those tales.

  One last bit of the legend. According to the story, a local man was bathing in the Malden River in 1825, just west of the graveyard near the Medford Street bridge. And while he was there, buck naked in the cold water, he glanced up the eastern bank, where he could see the edge of the Sandy Bank
Burial Ground and the door of the old chemist’s tomb.

  That’s when the door moved. It opened, and then, as if stumbling slowly between one world and the next, a man walked out.

  The bathing man was horrified, and he bolted out of the river with a cry. He didn’t even bother to grab his clothes. He simply ran as fast as he could, straight into town and down the streets in full view of the public. I doubt it’s the first historical record of a streaker, but I’m sure it made quite the impression nonetheless.

  The figure who had stumbled out of the tomb, however, was just a man. No ghost, no undead corpse, no vengeful spirit looking for his head. Just a local drunk who had found his way inside the night before, and curled up in a corner to sleep it off.

  Whether or not the tale of the chemist was true, it’s hard to ignore a story with the power to send a man screaming naked down the street. Sometimes folklore is significant for the history it preserves, and other times for the mark it leaves behind.

  And that, my friends, is the naked truth.

  LET’S BE CLEAR before I tell you this story: I have very little evidence it’s real. But sometimes we have to entertain the possibility that odd things can happen and that folklore can carry them forward, like a scrap of paper on the wind. This, I think, is one of those scraps.

  Henry lived in Honey Grove, Texas, located northeast of Dallas, up near the Oklahoma border. Today Honey Grove is a small town, but it was even smaller in 1893—perhaps eight hundred citizens or so. And Henry was one of them.

  One day Henry ran out on his girlfriend. We don’t know the reason for the split—maybe he left her for another woman, or perhaps they had an argument and this was one of those heat-of-the-moment things. We just know that Henry left her, and it broke her heart.