Dreadful Places

by Aaron Mahnke

  The spirit refused to tell Lucy what it was, but she admitted giving it to John the night before. Horrified, Lucy opened the vial and gave the last few drops to one of the cats, who died just moments later. The following day, John’s breathing slowed and his heartbeat became harder and harder to find. Finally, hours later, it stopped for good.

  THE INFECTION

  If fear were a virus, it would be declared highly infectious by the Centers for Disease Control. Fear has this way of spreading from person to person like the common cold in a grade-school classroom. Give fear enough time, and it’ll infect everyone in the room, or the house, or the town.

  Which is why we have folklore. Because folklore has this way of inoculating us against fear. It provides us with explanations and answers when there’s just too much mystery. Folklore creates the illusion of logic, and that can stop the spread of fear.

  Unless, of course, that folklore is more frightening than the mystery it explains. It’s hard enough to not be afraid of odd noises in your own home. But when the only explanation involves evil spirits and witchcraft…well, you can see how that might fan the flames.

  Of course, it could all have been a hoax. History is full of hoaxes that prey on the fears of the superstitious. It’s possible that a few of the Bell children were in on that hoax, and that they somehow managed to work together to pull it all off. It’s also possible that the whole family sat down, planned it out, and then performed the entire mystery. But for what reason?

  It’s been two centuries since those events, and we still don’t know what really happened. What we do know, however, is that the stories have fascinated people—and still do. Even while they were taking place, word spread far enough that hundreds of people traveled to witness them firsthand. And most of them got what they wished for.

  One story stands out above all the others. Five years before the events on the Bell farm, John’s three oldest sons fought in the War of 1812. They were participants in the Battle of New Orleans, serving under General Andrew Jackson. So when the spirit’s reputation reached Jackson’s ear, he decided to come see it for himself.

  He arrived one day in 1819, along with several other travel companions. Just outside the Bell farm, though, their wagon became stuck. The men worked hard to make sure none of the wheels was caught on a rock or in thick mud, but no matter what they did, they couldn’t get the wagon to roll free.

  That’s when a voice spoke up and welcomed Jackson and his friends to the farm. A voice without a body. It called itself Kate, and told them it would see them all later that evening. After that, the wagon miraculously unstuck itself, and they were able to move on.

  One of Jackson’s friends didn’t care for the suggestion that there was something supernatural going on at the farm. Later that night after dinner, the man waved his pistol around in the air, claiming there was a silver bullet in the chamber and threatening to shoot the spirit or witch or whatever it was.

  Instead, the man was struck with a fit of seizures. He shouted out that someone was poking him with needles. That he was being beaten violently. But no one was touching him. Then the front door of the house opened on its own, and the man was kicked out into the night by an invisible force.

  Jackson and his men left the following morning.

  IF YOU LIVED there, you just sort of accepted the fact that at some point, things were going to disappear. But of course, that was the price you had to pay if you wanted to live in one of the most beautiful parts of Maine.

  It was a vast expanse of old-growth forest, just twenty miles north of Augusta, Maine’s capital city. Those miles and miles of deep green treetops are broken only by the occasional lake—Great Pond, East Pond, The Narrows. And for as long as anyone could remember, if you had a cabin in that area, you’d be wise to lock it up, because things had a way of going missing.

  Then, on April 4, 2013, a police officer responded to a silent alarm in a cabin at a summer camp called Pine Tree. Minutes later, he arrived and caught the thief. His name was Christopher Thomas Knight. He’d lived there in the forest for nearly thirty years, subsisting entirely off nature and stolen supplies—and he’d been perfectly happy doing so.

  Until his arrest, though, he was just one of hundreds of people who step into America’s forests each year and just…vanish. After he’d gone missing, everyone had just assumed Knight was dead. Because when you slip away like that—into the dark embrace of the wild and wooded backcountry—your chances are pretty slim.

  We humans have tamed much of the world with our roads and maps, but there are still a lot of unknown places out there. And the unknown always has a way of inspiring fear. Add in the chance of disappearing and never coming back, and the woods can be downright terrifying.

  Some locations, though, seem to attract a disproportionate amount of mystery. They act like magnets for tragedy, or a dark beacon designed to lure people to their doom. And one of the most mysterious places of all is right here in the wilds of New England.

  So let’s take a walk. Let’s wander along the trail, and explore the shadows within the trees. But watch your step; you never know what’s waiting for you just beyond the edges of the path.

  BOUNDARIES

  Benning Wentworth was a greedy, egotistical man, which made him a perfect fit for the age of British colonial expansion in the New World. In 1741, at the age of forty-five, he was appointed governor of the colony of New Hampshire. Eight years later the crown gave him the power to distribute land grants.

  In 1761, he drew up charters for new territory that would one day become Vermont, arbitrarily drawing township squares all over the map. One of those random boundaries was drawn around a mountain in the southwestern corner of the state, just northeast of Bennington, a town named by Benning Wentworth after himself. And this mountain, and the township around it, borrowed a magical name from England: Glastenbury.

  This mountain is an interesting piece of folklore jutting up from the landscape. Long before the British began to spread into the region, the land there belonged to the Algonquin nation of Native Americans, specifically the Abenaki tribe. And they have stories about the mountain there. Stories that are not tourist-friendly.

  The Abenaki stayed away from the top of the mountain because they believed it was cursed. Hunters would frequently get lost there, thanks in part to the erratic wind that seemed to change direction every few minutes.

  But the biggest reason for staying away was the legend of an enchanted stone. They say it looked like any other boulder on the mountain, but if you were unlucky enough to step on it, you would vanish into thin air. So quickly, in fact, that you wouldn’t even have time to scream.

  Because of all of that, when the first European settlers arrived in southern Vermont, the Abenaki strongly urged them to avoid settling on the mountain. Which, of course, they did anyway. In 1791, at the time of the first state census, Glastenbury township had a total of six families living there. But it wasn’t until the Civil War was over that the population broke one hundred.

  That’s when people started to realize, “Hey, there are a lot of trees here!” So they built a sawmill. And then another. Soon they were building kilns, too—dozens of them, all running nonstop to create charcoal that was then exported to places like New York for use in iron production. And with all that economic growth came a lot more people.

  In 1872 the Bennington-Glastenbury Railroad was constructed as a way to move the charcoal down the mountain faster, and to bring settlers back up. But wherever humans gather in large numbers, so does darkness. It’s like a cloud that follows us around. Wherever we build communities, tragedy and loss and death just sort of come with the package.

  In 1892, a sawmill worker named Henry McDowell attacked another man, John Crawley, by picking up a rock and beating him to death. Before the authorities could capture McDowell, he skipped town and headed south. He made it as far as
South Norwalk, Connecticut, before he was taken into custody, but it only got weirder from there.

  He confessed to the murder, but blamed it on the voices in his head. They wouldn’t stop, he said, and they wanted him to kill again. So he was returned to Vermont and placed in the state asylum there. For a while, at least.

  Local legend says that McDowell escaped the facility and made his way back to Glastenbury by hiding on one of the train cars that headed up the mountain. If the legends are true, he lived out the rest of his days right there in the forest.

  Five years later, in 1897, John Harbour and his brother Harry were out hunting just south of Glastenbury Mountain. They had separated a bit, although in the forest all you really needed was a few dozen feet of distance before you felt isolated and alone. At one point, Harry heard a gun go off, and then a cry for help from somewhere nearby. “I’ve been shot!” the voice of John shouted.

  Harry searched the area, but he couldn’t find his brother. He gathered some friends to help, but still had no luck. It wasn’t until the following morning that they finally stumbled upon his body. But there was something not quite right about the scene they discovered.

  First, John’s body was found lying under the wide branches of an old cedar tree with his rifle beside him. But the gun was loaded and seemed to be just out of reach, as if someone else had placed it there later. And there were also drag marks in the pine needles and dirt, indicating that John had been dragged to the tree.

  No one ever figured out how John Harbour had been killed. No other hunter came forward to confess to having accidentally shot the man, and no other clues came to light. It was a murder, that much was clear, but it would forever remain a tragic cold case.

  Which, in most other towns, might stand out on the pages of local history as a major story. But Glastenbury wasn’t like most towns. The people there were no strangers to unusual occurrences. Yes, John Harbour’s death was mysterious, but it wasn’t the first time something unexplainable had happened.

  And, tragically, it wouldn’t be the last.

  OFF THE TRAIL

  There’s a story about something that happened near Glastenbury way back in the middle of the nineteenth century, a few decades before the murders of John Crawley and John Harbour. If it’s true, though, it paints a frightening backdrop for a lot of the events that followed through the years.

  Before the train route was constructed between Bennington and Glastenbury, people who didn’t want to hike all the way up the mountain were transported by stagecoach. On one particular day the trip departed Bennington late in the evening, and by the time they were halfway to their destination, the skies had opened up and a torrential downpour had begun to fall.

  Glastenbury Mountain wasn’t a great place to be in weather like that. The mountain is steep, rising an average of 250 feet every mile. The stagecoach would have been making that journey on a wide dirt path—dirt that would have quickly transformed into mud as the rain continued to fall.

  First the driver slowed down, but then he was forced to pull over and stop. Despite the rain, he picked up his glass-enclosed lantern and climbed down from his seat. Then, careful not to slip, he began to inspect the wheels and the depth of the mud they were buried in. And that’s when he noticed something odd.

  There were footprints in the mud around the coach. Footprints that were much larger than his own, and if the impressions were any indication, the feet that made them weren’t wearing shoes. So, like any expendable extra in a horror flick, he turned and followed them, only to discover that they vanished into the forest.

  That’s when something large and powerful slammed against the side of the carriage. Passengers began to exit the coach, spilling out into the mud and rain. A moment later, the stagecoach toppled onto its side. Then, slowly emerging from the darkness at the side of the road, a shape stepped into the weak lantern light.

  They say it was tall, perhaps two heads taller than a grown man. The thing was covered entirely in wet, matted hair, and its eyes seemed to reflect a yellow light back from the lantern. For a long, tense moment, the creature stood there beside the wreckage of the overturned stagecoach before turning away, blending into the shadows once again.

  Life in Glastenbury was certainly never boring. Between the nighttime encounter with what would become known as the Bennington Monster and the murders to follow a couple of decades later, people in the area never really felt completely safe in their isolated woodland community.

  But there was more to worry about than mysterious creatures. Glastenbury, you see, was dying. It was inevitable, really. When your only business is cutting down trees, chopping them up, and then burning them, it has a way of transforming a place. By the late 1880s, all the local forest was gone, stripped away by the economic greed of the town.

  They tried to fight it, though. Beginning in 1894, everything was reinvented with an eye toward bringing in summer tourists. The old coal-powered train was converted over to electric passenger trolleys. Buildings in town were gutted and remodeled to serve as hotels and a casino. It was expensive, sure, but it was also their only hope. If they could no longer sell the forest, they had to market something else to the public.

  And for one season, it worked. During the summer of 1897, scores of people traveled from far and wide to experience life in a frontier resort town. The hotels were full, and the casino offered ample entertainment. But a mountain stripped of its forest is a mountain ill-prepared for spring, and when the calendar rolled around and the snow began to melt, something happened.

  A flood. The technical term for it is freshet, when snow and rain overfill a river and cause flooding. And in the spring of 1898, a powerful flood rushed down the mountainside and washed away the trolley tracks. In one tragic moment, the town’s new lifeline had been severed, and like a garden without water, everything began to dry up and die.

  Over the years to come, Glastenbury all but vanished. The hotels and casino fell apart. Homes disintegrated until nothing but their foundation stones remained. By the 1930s, the entire population of Glastenbury consisted of just three people: Ira Mattison, his wife, and his mother. In 1937, Glastenbury became the first town in Vermont to be officially disorganized. And then, for the next two decades, it was empty.

  Well, not entirely. You see, the trees eventually returned, and with them came that siren’s call that lures people into the woods. Except these were probably not the best woods to wander around in—the Abenaki had been pretty clear about that, after all. Nevertheless, people returned to Glastenbury Mountain. But when they did, they discovered a very difficult truth.

  It seemed that the darkness that inhabited the mountain had never really left.

  LONG GONE

  On November 11, 1943, two men went hunting just north of Glastenbury Mountain. There was a chill in the air that morning as Carl Herrick and his cousin Henry set up their camp, and then the men grabbed their rifles and headed out into the woods. It was deer season, and they wanted to make the most of their time.

  During the hunt, the men split up. It was a common thing to do, even though it left each of them alone in a forest full of dangers. By afternoon, Henry had given up and wandered back to their camp, but Carl wasn’t there yet. So he waited.

  When daylight had faded into that hazy gray twilight between day and night, Henry finally decided something was wrong. So he hiked his way back out of the trees and ran to the police. Shortly thereafter a search party returned to the woods near the campsite to begin looking for Carl.

  It took them three days. Three days of slowly walking through the trees. Three days in the snow and cold. Three days of worry. But in the end, they found him. Carl’s body was lying flat on the ground, and his rifle was nearly a hundred feet away, just leaning against a tree.

  Interestingly, the ground around his body was covered in enormous footprints. The hunters who found hi
m weren’t sure what sort of animal had made them, but they guessed it had been a bear. Which was odd, because Carl Herrick hadn’t been mauled or injured in any way consistent with a bear attack.

  He’d been squeezed to death.

  Sadly, Carl wouldn’t be the last to experience the dangerous nature of the woods around Glastenbury Mountain. Just two years later, in 1945, a seventy-four-year-old hunting guide named Middie Rivers was leading a group of visiting hunters through the trees when he slipped out of view ahead of them. One of the others hurried to catch up to Rivers, but he wasn’t there. After searching for over a month, locals gave up hope. No one ever saw Middie Rivers again.

  Paula Welden was the next to go missing. A year after Rivers vanished into the unknown, Paula left her college dorm in Bennington to go for a hike. At 3:00 p.m. on December 1, she pulled on her bright red jacket and hiking shoes, and set off on the well-known Long Trail, where many people remembered seeing her. But she never returned.

  One elderly couple who noticed her that day claimed that she had been about a hundred yards ahead of them, but they lost sight of her when she rounded a bend where two trails intersected. When they reached the same crossing, they were surprised to no longer see her. She’d simply vanished.

  There was a massive search effort. There was a large cash reward. They had helicopters and dogs and over a thousand people. Everything that could have been done to find her was done. And with that bright red jacket on, you’d think she’d be easy to spot. But after three long weeks of fruitless searching, they all went home empty-handed.

  Four years later, on October 9, 1950, Paul Jepson was out with his mother in their truck. I’ve read that the Jepsons ran the town dump, or maybe were pig farmers, so I’m not exactly sure what Paul’s mother was doing that day. But she pulled over near the tree line and got out for a moment, leaving eight-year-old Paul inside.