The World of Lore: Dreadful Places

by Aaron Mahnke

  Some versions of the tale say that this unnamed woman killed herself over the loss. Some assume she moved on and found happiness later. But it was the act of breaking up, of Henry leaving her, abandoned and alone, that drives the tale. Because this unnamed woman had a brother, and he wasn’t very happy with what Henry had done.

  And so it was that one day Henry was outside his house in Honey Grove when the brother arrived to give Henry a lesson. I would like to believe that he didn’t come with the intent to kill. The line between crimes of passion and crimes of premeditation is wide and tall, and it takes a lot of planning and resolve to cross it. It’s hard to say if this man had that sort of dedication in him. But at the very least, he had a gun.

  They argued. They shouted. The brother demanded Henry make amends and set things right, fix his sister’s broken heart. And when Henry failed to cooperate, he pulled his gun out. He held it straight out, hand trembling with rage and fear, and pointed it at Henry’s head.

  And then he fired.

  Blood sprayed from Henry’s head and his body fell backward, landing in a lifeless heap on the lawn near the large tree. That’s when panic washed over the brother, and he bolted. Later, when he had locked himself up at home, that panic was joined by regret and distress. Fearing for what he had done, and what it meant for his future, he took the same pistol and turned it on himself.

  It’s a tragic story, and not a fun one to listen to if it ends there. But it doesn’t. You see, Henry got back up from that spot on the lawn near the tree. He pressed his hand to his head and felt pain. There was indeed blood, but not as much as he’d expected. So he went to the doctor, who patched him up and sent him home.

  Twenty years went by. Two decades of life that Henry probably viewed as a gift. He had been shot in the head, after all, but the bullet somehow only grazed him and then disappeared. So here he was, healthy, older, and enjoying his life in Honey Grove, Texas.

  One day in the summer of 1913, Henry walked outside to take care of an old problem. The large tree in his front yard had grown too close to the house, and the shade was causing problems. Today was the day to remedy that by getting rid of the old tree.

  Now, we have to lean into the story here and trust in the details. We’re told that Henry didn’t have an axe or saw or anything that might help him take the tree down in the usual manner, and we have to believe that. I know, not having an axe would indeed be unusual, but then again, most folklore is born out of unusual moments, isn’t it?

  So Henry grabbed the next best thing: a stick of dynamite. He took a piece of rope and tied the explosive to the trunk of the tree, low to the ground opposite the house. Then he lit the fuse and ran for cover.

  And it worked. The explosion went off, and the tree toppled to the ground away from the house. But as the tree was slowly falling, Henry was doing the same thing. And both of them hit the ground at the same time. Neither would move again.

  I have to assume a neighbor found Henry’s body. Someone did, at least, and they took him to the doctor to find out what the cause of death had been. The carnage in the yard seemed to suggest that a piece of the tree had perhaps pierced Henry’s skull. There was certainly enough blood to validate that theory.

  But they were wrong. When the doctor opened Henry’s skull to find the source of the fatal wound, he found something unusual, something very much unlike a piece of wood.

  A bullet.

  In fact, it was a bullet from a pistol. The bullet, you see, that had been fired at Henry two decades earlier. After grazing his skull that fateful day in 1893, the bullet had embedded itself in the tree behind him. And there it had waited, motionless and benign, left to slowly vanish into an ever-expanding prison.

  It would have stayed there, too, if it hadn’t been for the dynamite.

  Sometimes our past has a way of tapping us on the shoulder and reminding us that it’s still there. We think we’re clear, that we made it out or got away, and then—with a sudden flash—it all comes rushing back into our mind.

  Or, in the case of poor Henry, back into his head.

  THE ROOM WAS packed with visitors. That wasn’t an unusual thing, though. The home of Gabriel Godefroy was known far and wide as a friendly space. Many of the older settlers gathered there on a regular basis, along with some of the men from the local Native American tribes.

  Godefroy was one of the oldest men in town, actually. So old, in fact, that he could remember when Detroit had been under French rule, long before the Americans took over, and the British before that. In 1805, few could make that claim.

  So they gathered there under his roof. They lounged and drank and laughed. But the centerpiece of their time in Godefroy’s house was the storytelling. Man after man would recount dramatic stories of their dangerous pasts.

  One moment a powerful chief such as Okemos or Tecumseh would thrill the crowd with accounts of amazing hunts, and the next it would be Antoine Beaubien or Whitmore Knaggs detailing some harrowing escape during their youth.

  It wasn’t a pretty place. They say the candlestick holders were nothing but empty bottles. And no servants waited on the men gathered there. Everyone helped themselves, like a big family more than a fancy dinner party. And that’s the way they liked it.

  In the winter, the fire was warm and bright; in the summer, the cider was cool and refreshing. But on this night, the cider had run out. So the men asked their host for something stronger.

  “Go ask Jean,” Godefroy told them. “He has the key to the cellar.”

  Jean was Jean Beaugrand, Godefroy’s clerk, who lived in the barn out back. He was an older man with a sour disposition. The story says that children in the neighborhood avoided him because he had a habit of talking to himself, mumbling under his breath as he walked through the streets. He was creepy and rude and always kept to himself.

  The oddest thing about Jean Beaugrand, though, was his horse. First, it was older than anyone could remember. Even Godefroy, who had been there longer than the rest, remembered the old horse from his childhood in French Detroit. But despite this, the animal still managed to make its way all over the town, eating from gardens and jumping over fences to escape.

  The horse—known as Sans Souci to the locals—could apparently jump pretty high, too. Higher than they would expect from a young horse, let alone that ancient, emaciated thing that walked around their neighborhood. One legend claims she jumped a fence over twelve feet high.

  But the weirdest thing of all, they say, is how the horse would stand in the street near a crowd of people, and when something humorous was said, Sans Souci would laugh along with everyone else. It was off-putting, to say the least.

  So when Godefroy told the men to go find Jean Beaugrand, they didn’t really know what to expect. One of the Native Americans volunteered to go look around the property for the man, but when he came back, there was a look of fear on his face.

  “He’s in the barn,” the man told the others. “But he’s with that horse. They’re sitting at a table together. Laughing. And talking.”

  Everyone glanced around at their neighbors and then chuckled nervously. After a moment of awkward silence, Godefroy himself stood up and motioned to some of the others.

  “We’ll just see about this,” he said coldly.

  The group headed around back to the old barn, and then the men climbed the ladder to the landing outside the loft area. When they reached the top, they peered through a gap in the door and saw something almost otherworldly. The man and the horse were seated together at a table, and they were sharing a cup of some golden liquid. And playing cards.

  Godefroy had seen enough. He kicked the door open and barged into the room, along with two of his guests, and that’s when all three of them saw something unexplainable: the horse, startled by their sudden entrance, leapt into the air and flew out an open window.

  Someone in the crowd accused Jean
Beaugrand of witchcraft, but he laughed and flatly denied the charge. “The horse has been in the stable below all evening,” he told them. “Go look for yourselves.”

  The horse was right where he said it would be. So the men dismissed it all as a trick of the light or the result of an evening of drinking. After they had gathered back inside, the night went on as it always did. But still, they couldn’t help but wonder if the horse had really flown.

  So word spread. Rumors always follow unusual events like that. They are the leaves on the ground that tell us what the tree once looked like. They are the footprints in mud that help us track the animal. They hint that something else is going on.

  And the rumor mill was running at full speed in the weeks following. Because the tale of Sans Souci flying out a window into the night seemed to confirm all of their fears. The horse wasn’t a horse at all, but a monster of some kind. A shape-shifter, able to take the form of a horse when it wanted, but still able to talk and laugh and act like a person.

  It was only weeks later when all of the pieces seemed to fall into place for those who believed the tales. It was later that spring, on the morning of June 11, 1805, that a fire broke out in the stables of a local baker named John Harvey. When it was done, the fire had burned all of Detroit to the ground, save for one lonely warehouse building and a forest of chimneys.

  Some people saw more than flames that morning, though. More than dark smoke and toppling walls. More than the bucket brigade running water from the river to the fires. According to the legend, they saw something else. A little red man, standing atop the Godefroy barn.

  And this red man, they say, was laughing.

  NOTHING CAN BE as isolating or confining as the woods. They seem to cut us off from the rest of the world, leaving us alone, balanced on the edge of being lost. Even in these thoroughly modern times, the woods seem to exist as a reminder that so much of the world is outside of our control.

  Sure, we could stay on the path, but those narrow routes between the trees only give us the illusion of control, like a trail of breadcrumbs. They’re fragile and fleeting, and somewhere in the back of our minds we understand that if we were to leave the trail, we would be stepping into the unknown.

  The woods hide things from us. For centuries, criminals have used the dark cloak of the forest to conceal everything from bootlegging and poaching to drug use and murder. The woods hide wildlife from us, and instill just enough doubt and mystery that we end up believing that anything could be living out there.

  Anything.

  Some areas, though, are darker than others. In some places, the woods are more than just a gathering of trees and undergrowth. There are locations in our world that are consistently avoided, plagued by rumor, and dense with fear. To step into one of these places is to abandon all safety, all reason, and all hope.

  THE BRIDGEWATER TRIANGLE

  Between the three Massachusetts towns of Abington, Rehoboth, and Freetown exists a triangular slice of land that has become home to hundreds of reports of unexplainable phenomena. It’s known as the Bridgewater Triangle, though some call it the Black Triangle or the Devil’s Triangle. It might not be swallowing up fighter jets and Colonial-era ships like the Bermuda Triangle far to the south, but its history is just as storied and mysterious.

  One of the areas within the Triangle is the Hockomock Swamp. It’s a 17,000-acre wetland near Bridgewater, Massachusetts. In the 1600s, it was inhabited by the Wampanoag tribe of Native Americans, and the fort they built inside it became a strategic location for them during King Philip’s War in 1674.

  One legend details how, during this time of upheaval and invasion by the colonists, a powerful artifact was lost in the swamp. Now, I can’t find anything beyond a small Wikipedia entry to confirm this, but the story tells of how an object known as a wampum belt was lost during the war. And as a result, the swamp became a home to restless spirits.

  Ever since, the swamp has been the source of a nearly endless supply of unexplainable sightings. One of the most dramatic and best-documented reports was made by a local police officer, Sergeant Thomas Downy.

  On a summer night in 1971, Downy was driving toward the town of Easton, near a place known as Bird Hill, which sits at the edge of the swamp. As he approached the hill, he caught sight of an enormous winged creature. Downy claims it was over six feet tall and had a wingspan of almost twelve feet.

  After reporting the sighting to the Easton police, he quickly earned the nickname “Birdman.” I don’t know about you, but it seems odd that a police officer would risk his reputation on such an unusual claim if it was just a joke. Officer Downy clearly saw something that night. Just what that thing was, of course, is open to debate.

  Decades earlier, in 1939, a Civilian Conservation Corps crew was working on the edge of the swamp near King Philip’s Street. While there, workers claimed to have seen a huge snake as large around and as black as a stovepipe. According to the report, the snake coiled for a moment, raised its head, and then vanished into the swamp.

  And what wooded area would be complete without Bigfoot sightings? Although a tall, hairy creature has been sighted dozens of times over the years in various parts of the Bridgewater Triangle, the most common appearances have been near the swamp.

  In 1983, John Baker, a local fur trapper, had a similar experience. He was on his canoe in the swamp when he heard a splash. He turned to see “a hairy beast slog into the river and pass within a few yards” of his boat.

  In 1978, local man Joe DeAndrade was standing on the shore of a pond known as Clay Banks. He claims that he turned and saw what he described as “a creature that was all brown and hairy, like an apish man-thing.” Oddly enough, I went to high school with a guy who fits that description.

  But there’s been more than just weird animal sightings in the swamp. As far back as the late nineteenth century, locals have reported seeing unusual lights. One report was made by two undertakers who were traveling past the swamp on Halloween night in 1908. They claimed to have seen a light that hovered in the sky for almost an hour.

  Whether the reports of creatures and lights are true or not, it might be worth mentioning that the word hockomock literally means “the place where spirits dwell.”

  LIGHTS AND LITTLE PEOPLE

  Another hot spot, in the southeastern corner of the triangle, is Freetown State Forest. If all the stories are to be believed, it’s the quintessential haunted forest.

  Deep inside the park is a cliff, known as Assonet Ledge, that overlooks an old quarry. There have been reports of hauntings near the Ledge, of visions and ghostly figures. Some stories tell of a woman in white who lingers near the precipice. Others claim to have heard voices while visiting there.

  The most common report is of mysterious lights. Some researchers think they know exactly where those lights come from, too: they’re the tools of a creature known as the pukwudgie.

  In ancient Wampanoag folklore, the pukwudgie is a small forest-dwelling creature, something like a troll or a goblin, that lives in the wooded areas around the swamp. Aside from having one of the most entertaining names to say out loud, they are said to be small, hairy people, roughly three feet tall, who hide in the woods and cause trouble for people who discover them.

  What kind of trouble? Well, Wampanoag folklore tells of how the pukwudgies used lights to lure travelers into the woods, where they would meet their death. These lights, according to legend, are known as the Tei-Pai-Wankas, a North American version of the English will-o’-the-wisp, sometimes referred to as “ghost lights.” Rather than attacking hikers outright, though, apparently the pukwudgies prefer to let the land itself kill their victims.

  Coincidentally, one of the most common experiences reported by visitors to the Ledge is an overwhelming urge to jump. Normal, healthy people have felt nearly suicidal standing atop the Ledge. Many of them claim that upon approaching the edge o
f the cliff, they felt an almost uncontrollable desire to jump off into the dark, rocky water over one hundred feet below.

  BILL RUSSO

  One story in particular bears retelling. Bill Russo was a welder from Raynham, Massachusetts. He worked long hours, and for the six years prior to his retirement, he worked a late shift from 3:00 p.m. until midnight.

  By the time he got home from work each night, Bill’s dog, Samantha, would be in desperate need of a walk. So before bed Bill would take her out and let her get some exercise. They kept this habit up, each and every night, no matter the season or weather.

  On a night in 1995, Bill took Samantha out for their usual midnight walk. Their typical route was to stay on the sidewalks and head toward the center of town, but on this night Bill decided, on a whim, to cut through his own backyard and head along a trail through the woods alongside the swamp. Not a choice I would have made, mind you, even with a German shepherd–Rottweiler mix as my companion.

  About half a mile into their walk, at a place where the path was crossed by a road, Samantha began acting odd. She was tugging at the leash and trembling, and kept glancing back at Bill with worried eyes. Bill tried to lead her home, but the dog wouldn’t budge. She just whined and quivered where she stood.

  After a moment, Bill began to hear the sound that had frightened his dog. It was a thin, high-pitched voice, faint at first but growing louder as it continued. And even though Bill couldn’t understand what the voice was saying, it kept repeating the same sounds.

  “Eee wah chu,” it seemed to say. “Eee wah chu.”

  It was midnight in the woods, so of course Bill couldn’t see anything. But he tried. He scanned the trees and bushes for whatever could be making the sounds. There was even a streetlight nearby, casting a circle of pale light on the pavement, but he saw nothing there.