The Chase Wild Animal Farm Mystery

Bill Chase is on the right.... we lifted this pic from the Circus No Spin Zone website

Halifax is a quiet little town off of Route 106 in the rural center of Plymouth County in Massachusetts. While it doesn't qualify as "the middle of nowhere" since the commuter rail hit it, Halifax is still a place where nothing happens. I don't mind saying this, because I'm a former resident of Halifax, and I know that locals like it when nothing happens there.

Halifax is largely residential today, but there was a time when it was a resort spot. The railroad lines that ran into town brought people from the teeming cities of the No Widespread Air Conditioning era. They were thrilled to spend a summer in a cabin, enjoying the many benefits of Silver Lake and (pre-algal blooms) Monponsett Lakes. Cars and highways brought day trippers.

Businesses in town were built to suit the needs of these cash-carrying tourists. Since the land was cheap, a businessman could afford to think Big. A man named Bill Chase got into the import/export business, and his stock in trade was wild animal hunting/exhibiting/selling. Most of us don't know anyone who could get us an elephant... but if you knew Bill Chase, you knew someone who could get you an elephant. You also missed your chance, as he died in the 1980s.

He had some gig, which I'm betting is quasi-illegal now, where he would capture animals in Africa, store them at his western Africa depot, and then ship them to zoos and reservations and whoever else orders things like Leopards. He also was in on some animal storage thing in Florida, which is most likely where his Wild Animal Farm animals spent their winters.

What wild animal farm, you ask? Why, I'm talking about the Chase Wild Animal Farm that used to be in Halifax, Massachusetts. In 1955, Chase moved his Chase Wild Animals Farm (which, due to his unfortunate last name, implies that you get to hunt the wild animals) from Egypt/Scituate Massachusetts to Halifax, Massachusetts.

The farm (part of the Chase Enterprises, Inc. empire) had permits allowing them to keep the animals in their "natural habitat," which is sort of funny because no part of Africa, let alone the parts with the cheetahs and hyenas running around, has Halifax's climate. They had a veritable Wild Kingdom happening off of Route 106, about where the Country Club is today.

Residents of the park included elephants, cheetahs, anteaters, leopards, zebra, llamas, various exotic birds and God knows what else. Admission was 50 cents for adults, and 25 cents "for moppets."

They used the Zebra as the mascot for the farm, and cardboard zebras were placed on highways to make sure that tourists didn't sleep on the Dark Continent happening in Halifax. They had free advertising from an animal-themed Boston TV show, sponsored by a Chase-friendly dog food manufacturer. They had a promotional deal with a local soda company. They opened themselves up to churches, schools and youth groups, making sure every kid left with a free (advertising) bumper sticker.

You could work a pretty good 1950s vacation in these parts. When you weren't splashing around in one of the Monponsett Lakes, you could go see a leopard at Chase's, then go to Edaville Railroad some other day, take the kids to Duxbury to see an ocean the next day, check out the Pilgrim stuff in Plymouth on another day, then finish off the week (and your paycheck) at Lincoln Park in Dartmouth.

This was pre-Internet, and not far from an era where kids rolled a hoop down the street for fun. It is very far removed from my own style of vacationing, which generally involves places where I can't be extradited from, coca and a bevy of gringo-friendly prostitutes. We're getting away from the point, however... and if the kids weren't happy seeing a leopard and going to Lincoln Park, you could always send them off to Vietnam or- if what I saw on Happy Days was customary- have the Fonz slap some sense into them.

I moved to Hally in 2000, and dudes were hitting 200 yard drives off the tee where CWAF was by the time I showed up. CWAF was unprominent (we make up our own words sometimes, and patent the really catchy ones) enough that I can't find out when it closed on the Internet. I could probably find out if I went to the town's historical society person, but I'm not going to Halifax from Cape Cod until I'm sure that I have a pretty good chance at getting a hippo skull (more on that later). I also have to convince Jessica to go, and the last time she and I went exploring in an old park, we were nearly arrested for breaking into Edaville Railroad. That is a story for another day, however...

I do know that Chase was still looking for Rhesus Monkeys in 1957, so the park lasted at least that long. They ran a nine month season, closing after their big Yule Festival promotion that had Santa with real actual reindeer. I'm sure that elephants and toucans love Massachusetts in late December.

A guy on Facebook said it ran through the 1960s, and it was his post (taken from a forum on cougars in Massachusetts) that got my imagination working. Several locals have told me a similar version of the story. I didn't canvas the town or anything, but no one I chatted with about the farm who actually had lived there when it was operating hadn't been told some version of this story.

If I may cut and paste some....

"I grew up in Halifax, in the fifties and sixties. There was a wild animal farm there called the "Chase Wild Animal Farm" It's now the Halifax Country Club Golf Course. It was one of those walk-thru zoos in the forest,where the animals were barely restrained, and was finally shut down. 

The owner, a man name of Bob Belinda, released all the animals into the swamp, including big cats, birds, everything, before he was run out. Even elephants, alligators, monkeys, lions were in the swamps for years, and some undoubtedly cross-bred with local animals. 

After that time, we saw weird-looking birds like vultures, there were even yellow canaries that would attack other birds in swarms, and huge cats lived in the area after that. My father shot one huge cat by our barn, that was larger than a bobcat. We used to hear wild screams from the swamp in the summer, and Gawd knows what types of inbreeding went on. 

We had horses, goats and sheep that had to be watched closely becuse of the wild dog packs, and some of those that we killed resembled Hyenas. 

This can all be verified at the Halifax Town Hall. This is the area about a mile behind the King Supermarket on Plymouth street. You can start your own "Monsterquest," for real."

Nowwwww, we have something we can work with.

You and I both know that is nonsense. Let us count the ways.

A guy who sells wild animals has very little to gain from releasing them into the swamps of Massachusetts. Even if he chose to do so (see: Zanesville, Ohio), it would have made headlines very quickly. An elephant rampaging through Plympton would be one thing, but it would get ugly with the quickness if the liberated leopard started picking off Kingston schoolchildren.

Please understand that Logic only gets in the way of a good urban legend, even out in the sticks.

If they did escape unnoticed somehow, some animals would have a better chance of surviving than others. The tropical birds would be hurtin' for certain. The cheetah once roamed North America, but I'm not sure if Massachusetts was part of that range. Asiatic Cheetahs are capable of growing a winter coat. Amur leopards range into Siberia. Hannibal once took 38 elephants over the Alps to invade Rome, possibly passing within sight of the Matterhorn, and got a few of them across.

Still, every animal in the park would face long odds in a Massachusetts winter.

picture from Christine Murray Pearl

I have no idea how these species would interbreed with native fauna. The only thing I can see an elephant being able to shag around here would be a Jeep. A domestic cat would explode if a leopard entered her. Our local seagull population would be cooler if they interbred with escaped Macaws, but something like that would have been noticed as soon as they started opening McDonald's around here.

Perhaps an alligator could be responsible for the hybrid car-sized turtle said to haunt Great Herring Pond in Plymouth, but the killer mutant canaries story sounds eerily like the plot of that Sylvester/Tweety episode where Tweety gets into the steroids and swells up like 10000%, to the extent that he is then able to hunt Sylvester.

However, some "proof" does exist if you insist on pursuing the mass-release story. Where I'm headed with this is the Bridgewater Triangle theory.

The Bridgewater Triangle is a term used to describe an area of heightened spooky/paranormal activity. It runs from Rehoboth to Abington back to Freetown, although you could make great arguments for including some of the surrounding areas.

You name it, someone has seen it in the Triangle. UFOs? Check. Bigfoot? Twice spotted, once eating a pumpkin. Thunderbirds? Yup. Anaconda-sized snakes? You know they have it.

A man who knows the basic Bridgewater Triangle legends can turn his imagination towards matching Triangle monsters to things that might have been released (or escaped- they say that Chase favored a barely restrained style of animal husbandry) from the Chase Wild Animal Farm in Halifax. This is especially true if it happens during a slow news week.

The Beast of Truro? Perhaps this is what became of the Halifax leopard. I do wonder if Chase would bother to report a cheetah escape, or- if it killed someone- he'd just be like "Oh well, it must have belonged to someone else around here who frequently purchases leopards." The Pamet Puma, described by witnesses as a Big Cat style big cat, made no appearances after 1982.

That alligator corpse in Westport recently? Could it be a sewer-living offspring of a Chase gator? No. We've discussed alligators up north before, it never ends well for the Gator.  The Silver Lake Frogman could have been someone getting a fast glimpse at an alligator, but it could not have been, too.

Daniel Webster's Sea Monster, spotted off Duxbury? OK, too early. The same goes for the Cape Ann sea serpent, and we should mention here that Chase did not have any plesiosaurs or however they spell that.

Pukwudgies? Too early, the Wampanoags had lore of them. The Dover Demon? That could easily be escaped Rhesus monkeys, who would most likely have had the best chance of escaping Chase's farm.

Bigfoot sightings in Bridgewater? Could it have been someone mistaking a llama? Even if your answer is no, you simply have to grade that possibility far above "a Yeti wandered into a Massachusetts college town." Chase procuring and losing a bear without Google knowing 60 years later is also a possibility.

Giant snakes menacing workers in Hockomock Swamp? I bet there was a very short list of "people who might import an Anaconda into the greater Halifax area," and Chase was probably on the top of it. While the Hockomock snake story goes back to the Great Depression, Chase was in business in Scituate at the time, and your guess would be as good as mine as to "where in Massachusetts to get rid of an unwanted Reticulated Python."

Those monster stories are best left to the Monster Hunters. There's one grotesque part of the Chase legend that fascinates me, and that may finally move me into a trip back to my old Halifax stomping grounds.

An ugly story followed Chase around, both in Halifax and in his prior Scituate digs. When his animals died, he was rumored to have buried them on-site. According to local legend, the remains of a giraffe are buried in Scituate. Halifax, where I intend to prowl around some, is said to be the final resting place of a hippo.

It makes sense in a pre-EPA way. Let's say that your elephant moves on to the Final Answer. It's not like you're going to ship him back to Africa for burial. I doubt that any animal cemetery in the region could accommodate one. Much like when you have to kill someone, you go find an isolated spot out in a forbidding swamp and dig a hole wide enough and deep enough. While an elephant funeral would most likely be a great media event, it would raise ugly questions with the local officials... who might be understandably leery of the guy who keeps free-ranging cheetahs in town.

You can see where my man might want to do his dirt by his lonesome, on the D Low.

It is for God to judge him, and- seeing as he died in the 1980s- that probably has already happened. All I care about is where to dig for that Hippo skull.

Most of the time, we write about foliage and snowstorms and local matters, but this column does piss someone off now and then, and they sometimes are able to deduce my identity and thus my home address. This leads to animated discussions and sometimes even the presence of Johnny Law.

Now, I'm not a small man, and I like a good slobberknocker as much as the next guy does... but, if I can avoid conflict because my stalker foes are intimidated by the giant and ghastly Hippo skull that I have nailed to the front gable of my cottage, that counts as a win.

The Dirty Dozen: The Most Dangerous Places On (Or Just Off) Cape Cod

South Beach, Chatham

"Ahhhhh... nice beach here.... soft sand, warm water, clean air... think I'll take a swim. Oh, look! A seal! What's that shadow swimming next to him?"

Due to the cycle of the sea, seals began hanging out in large numbers off Chatham. After that, it becomes simple algebra.... sharks eat seals, seals hang out at Chatham, so therefore...

A great white shark goes 10-20 feet long and can bite a human being in half. If he's not looking that closely or if he's really hungry, we look kind of like seals in the right (wrong) light.

The last fatal shark attack in the general area was off Mattapoisett in 1936, but sharks are more prevalent now than at any point locals can remember.

To be fair to the sharks, humans are out on their turf. You can't blame one for wanting to try some People Food now and then.

Suicide Alley

A nasty stretch of Route 6 turns to 2 lanes- one East, one West. You're on a divided highway, but then cars start coming at you from the other lane. It's disconcerting. Suicide Alley runs 13 miles, from exit 9A in Dennis all the way to Orleans.

I don't think any other stretch of road has a worse reputation on Cape Cod, and no other ones have such an ominous nickname.

If someone from Cape Cod says "There was this terrible head-on accident..." someone else from Cape Cod will usually finish with "Suicide Alley?"

If other states have a Suicide Alley, they are not respected by Google. I saw no other Alley mentioned.

 Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant

It's actually a fairly nice part of the state... coastal, beachfront, in the pines. It's not melting down or anything, and any leaks presently are low-key. They have a lot of spent nuclear waste sitting around (in overloaded storage facilities), and they can't find anyone to take it off their hands.

However... the worst case scenario actually makes this the top risk in the general area. Imagine a massive accident there? With almost all winds imaginable, the radioactivity released could blanket Cape Cod.

At that point, Cape Cod becomes Cape Chernobyl. Farming would be viable in Sandwich in about 20,000 years.

Granted, Pilgrim's time is almost up, but it is still a big radioactive elephant in the room for this discussion.

The Wedge, Hyannis

The low-income area around the Cape Cod mall is notorious for violence.

"The Wedge" aka "The Triangle" aka "Captains Quarters" is a hot spot in Hyannis.

If you wish to buy drugs from someone in a sh*tty house who might be involved in a shooting later, you can do worse than the Hyannis Triangle.

You have a nice mix of poor people, homeless people, hard-drinking people, a lively drug trade and the Cape's only Gangsta scene... albeit one about 3 miles from the Kennedy Compound.

The Wedge is known locally as "Brockton-by-the-sea."

PAVE PAWS, Bourne

PAVE PAWS is a United States Air Force Space Command radar system operated by Space Wing squadrons for missile warning and space surveillance.... and I pasted that right from Wikipedia, so go to them if you disagree.

People tend to bug out when there's a high powered radar installation nearby, as they fear the government pounding high-powered radar into their heads 24/7/365.

A mountain of studies have been conducted on PAVE PAWS. General studies have dismissed the threat of an elevated cancer risk (when they found elevated cancer rates near the Pilgrim Plant when I was a kid, they blamed it on smokers), although there does seem to be an elevated rate of Ewing's Sarcoma among those who live near the P Double.

Ewing's Sarcoma is a form of bone cancer that generally attacks the hips, ribs, arms and legs. It is most commonly found in male teenagers.

I should add that nothing is proven here, and it is nice to have an early-warning missile detection system in place.

Bourne/Sagamore Bridges, Rotaries

This is actually what I personally fear more than anything else on the Cape. I fear heights, and this is as high as it gets.

Off the top of my head (from a previous article), I know it's a 40 meter drop off the Bourne Bridge. You'd make the fall in 1.6 seconds, and smash into the water (or onto the bike path, although at that height there really isn't that much difference) at about 35 mph.

Even if you don't do a goodbye-cruel-world leap off the bridge (this section of either Route 6 or Route 28 is the real Suicide Alley), you can skid on ice, get hit by a drunk, maybe catch some air... the possibilities are limitless.

The bridges were built in 1935 (ironically, both of these suicide launching platforms were Great Depression projects) or so, and they could probably use an overhaul or ten.

Make it over the Bourne Bridge... you hit a rotary. Rotaries are a dying form of Road Intersection that basically dares the driver to force their way into a traffic circle that looks like a mini-Daytona at times. The reason that the Rotary is dying as an art form is that a rotary is fretty pucking dangerous.

Mitt Romney gets unusual praise from this column for ridding Earth of that Sagamore Bridge rotary.

Pollock Rip Channel, off Chatham

The reason they built the Cape Cod Canal was that it shortened the distance one had to sail from New York to Boston. It allowed sailors to not have to sail around Cape Cod.

The reason that people use Pollock Rip Channel is that it saves a sailor from having to sail around Nantucket.

The reason God made Pollock Rip Channel is that God- for reasons known only to him- wanted the Cape Cod Canal built.

Long known as a ship graveyard, Pollock Rip is an area of shifting sand that is always hungry and only eats boats. As recently as 1950, 8 fishermen died within sight of the lightship pictured here during a gale.

 Strong tidal currents flowing in and out of Nantucket Sound meet weather from the open ocean to generate conditions that range from merely disorienting to completely treacherous.

Shangri-La/Onset, Wareham

If Hyannis can truly support the dubious claim that she is "Brockton-by-the-sea," then Onset is "a baby New Bedford." I personally stretch this area out to include the run of crack motels on the Cranberry Highway.

Shootings, stabbings, drug-dealing, armed robberies gone wrong, beat-downs, stick-ups... Wareham has all of the benefits of small-town life.

Throw in a ton of Section 8 folks, a genuinely rotten economy, and BOOM goes the dynamite.

Wareham recently tried Operation Safe Streets, a massive episode of enhanced policing. While results have been mixed, at least they're trying.

Horseshoe Shoals

A ship-smasher of a spot that also was a good reason to build the Cape Cod Canal, Horseshoe Shoals is an area of shallow ocean that helps give Nantucket Sound her nasty reputation.

Horseshoe Shoals is too low to sail safely at low and medium tides (half the day, landlubbers). Horseshoe Shoals doesn't look like it's that far from land, but looks is deceiving, man. You don't want to have to swim to Chatham, even during the Great White Shark off-season.

This was also the proposed setting for the doomed Cape Wind project. A forest of turbines would have only added to the difficulty of sailing through that region.

Massachusetts Military Reservation, Bourne

You'd think that, after the thousands of men with machine guns leave, a place wouldn't be dangerous anymore. But the MMR turned out to be the gift that keeps giving.

You don't explode stuff and shoot depleted uranium rounds without screwing up the groundwater, it seems. Explosive constituents leeched through the soil and into the groundwater.

They removed 25,000 tons of soil in hopes of stopping the contamination, but you can have the first (and middle, and last) vegetables grown from that region, thank you.

The general area also holds the distinction of Most Dead Bodies, as they host a military cemetery. I'm working from a shoddy memory, but I think that there may be 40,000 people buried there.

The Irish Riviera

This is sort of a hodge-podge category. Once we truly get over the bridges and out of Barnstable County, the answers quickly become "Taunton," "New Bedford" and "Fall River." We'll try to keep it at least around Cape Cod Bay, and use a sweeping Irish Riviera categorization.

This will be more of an amalgamation of hard-drinking South Shore residents, a growing Great White Shark presence (the last local shark attack on a human wasn't off Cape Cod, it was off of Manomet, in Plymouth), a gaggle of elderly drivers and the teen-slaying, winding, poorly-lit roads.  

Certain parts of the South Shore (we're looking at you, Marshfield!) were very bad places to be Loyalist during the Revolution.

Duxbury, not Boston, holds the title of Last Drive-By Shooting Featuring A Prominent Rapper.

The Bridgewater Triangle

We've visited this area for the column a few times. It is also a case where, once we've gone this far inland, we should include places like "Brockton." However, the Bridgewater Triangle is in a class by itself.

For those of you who don't know, the Bridgewater Triangle (a term coined by paramormal poppa Loren Coleman) is a sort of Rankin Cluster of odd and sometimes paranormal happenings. This eerie sandwich is mashed into a lightly-populated section interior southeastern Massachusetts. They represent hard, though.

To my knowledge, they have both of the state's "known" Bigfoot sightings. You know... stuff like that.

The Triangle, which we think should be expanded to Cape Cod anyhow, sneaks onto this list (it is originally from a 2012 Cape Cod TODAY article) over former mainstays Pufferbellies, the Port 'o' Call, and the Woods Hole/Naushon Island current.

Monster Turtle In Plymouth Pond?

Great Herring Pond, Plymouth MA

I was doing some research for an article that involved me needing to know some basic facts about Great Herring Pond in Plymouth/Bourne. I went to the Wikipedia page for GHP, and lo and behold!!

"There has been multiple sightings of massive turtles on Great Herring Pond. They have been seen to be in size of 4–5 feet long, with heads the size of footballs. They have been seen floating down stream from Little Herring Pond, under Carters Bridge."

Granted, "There has been multiple sightings" is some poor English, but I mangle smart-people talk in here all the time, so who am I to judge? If it's on Wikipedia, it has to be true, right?

If you need a laugh, know that I'm using the "if it's on Wikipedia..." argument to convince Jessica to spend some of her rare off duty time (she's working like 15 of the next 14 days) stomping through a Wallencamp swamp after a fictional giant turtle. I'll take her to Mezza Luna after, she'll be OK.

The important part is that Cranberry County Magazine owes it to our readers to chase monsters, especially when they are in our backyard.

Again, this is most likely what Colonel Potter used to call "bull hockey." Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Some kid may have slipped in a bit of fantasy about his neighborhood. We should be able to see what's what easily enough.

You see waves... I see "Monster Turtle Wake"

There are only a few species of turtles in Massachusetts. You can check them all out right here. The biggest of the bunch is the Common Snapping Turtle. They range across the US from the Atlantic to the Rockies, a range that includes all of Massachusetts.

The Common Snapping Turtle is the heaviest turtle in Massachusetts by a country mile. Unfortunately a record-breaking snapping turtle would be a shade less than 2 feet long (that's carapace or upper shell length, the lower shell/plastron is smaller... a snapping turtle can't hide in his shell like most other turtles when threatened, hence the Baby's Momma-like disposition), and northern specimens tend to be smaller than southern ones. 75 pounds would approach the weight record. "Two feet long max" is about a yard less Turtle than we need to support a search for a 4-5 foot turtle.

A turtle more in that range is the Alligator Snapping Turtle. They are a more southern turtle, and don't get north (naturally) much further than Tennessee. Could one survive here? Could a breeding, sustainable population exist in Massachusetts? How long until the National Marine Life Center herpetologist calls me back?

Alligator Snapping Turtles can grow to 30 inches long, and there is talk of one caught in Kansas who weighed 403 pounds. 30 inches is about where you call in the QB sneak in a goal line offense.

While a path to the sea does exist (you can herring your way downstream to the Cape Cod Canal from Great Herring Pond, and turtles can walk on land), the presence of giant sea turtles in a freshwater Plymouth pond seems unlikely. Still waiting for that NMLC call....

The kind of turtle we're looking for would have plenty of food to sustain it. This isn't Nessie that we're looking for. Great Herring Pond has, and I quote the Commonwealth of Massachusetts herself:

Fish Populations:
The pond was last completely surveyed in the summer of 1984 and nine fish species were present: yellow perch, white perch, white sucker, brown bullhead, banded killifish, smallmouth bass, chain pickerel, golden shiner and American eel. A May 2001 fish survey found abundant smallmouth bass and three additional species: largemouth bass, pumpkinseed and tesselated darter. Also, an occasional walleye is also reported. Alewife and blueback herring are abundant in the pond from late spring through fall.

That's enough for our Behemoth. The herring alone sustained the entire village of Wallencamp ("Wallencamp" is an avoid-a-lawsuit name an author hung on the Pondville section of the village of Cedarville in the town of Pymouth) for a while, and they eat more than one turtle can... even a big one.

He'd have plenty of room to hide. Great Herring Pond and the swampy area around it use up 400 acres or so, about the same area occupied by the Mission Hill neighborhood in Boston. The pond is 20 feet deep, and the turtle can stay submerged for two hours without breathing.

Great Herring Pond is just off of the southeastern edge of the Myles Standish State Forest. It is part of a vast swampy area that makes up the whole of interior Southern Plymouth. He (or even a brood of them) could very easily range from the Freetown/Lakeville area to Cape Cod up to Duxbury and over to Bridgewater. It'd just take him a while to walk through it all, because he's, like, a turtle.

The authors are not unaware that this monster turtle would be very much like a Bridgewater Triangle story, and his presence in Plymouth would further validate our theory that the Bridgewater Triangle should expand out to Cape Cod. The turtle could even be the guardian spirit for the cursed Sacrifice Rock Woods.

He'd also have plenty of time to grow. Studies suggest a possible 100 year life span for a Snapper, and they grow constantly from when they are born until the day that they die. This monster may have been born during World War I.

A four-foot snapping turtle, whether it was Common or Alligator, would be a terrible thing to have snapping at you. It could bite through your Achilles Tendon. It could easily kill any unattended baby that it got the drop on. It could kick in your back door, slap your best dog in the face, and make your wife cook it a T-Bone steak. It could tear out your heart and show it to you.

Bah Gawd, you know Cranberry County Magazine has to look for that!

1619 AD Cedarville

The part of Plymouth known as the Lakes region is a series of isolated villages where everyone knows everyone, and outsiders are suspicious just for being there. It's the sort of village where tales of a giant man-eating turtle shouldn't leak onto Wikipedia from. If you ain't from here, you don't come here, son.

Locals are reluctant to speak of the giant turtle, not wanting the circus media environment that would surround the announcement of the presence of a turtle large enough to merit hiring Quint. I'm local enough that I did manage to unearth some amazing stories, as the Monster Turtle is the subject of an intense if isolated urban legend.

"I never let my kids near that cursed pond," said one Cedarville housewife. "I didn't wreck my figure and nag my husband into an early grave just to feed my kid to some lake monster."

"I saw it once. It was the size of one of those sissy electric cars," said one man who asked to not be identified. He asked for privacy because he feared retribution from the turtle. "It was pulling a deer into the pond by the throat."

"You don't see a lot of transients in this area, which is unusual for a seasonal cottage neighborhood," said a source within the Plymouth Police Department. "We do get a lot of calls about roaring, splashing sounds and people screaming 'Help! I'm being devoured by a rhino-sized turtle!' now and then, but you know how those kids eat LSD these days."

"Cape Cod is a vastly overdevloped  tourist region right up until Cedarville, where it suddenly becomes isolated. Isolated forest is one thing, but this is isolated lakefront property on the largest body of freshwater east of Lakeville. It makes one wonder what chased the people away," said a local realtor. She even implied that the Cape Cod Canal was actually dug by the Cape's elite as a sort of anti-turtle salt water moat.

"People assume that the Wampanoags were cleared out of what is now known as Plymouth by plague," said historian Stephen Bowden. "One idea that has never been explored is the possibility that they were instead consumed by a bloodthirsty, Anklyosaurus-looking snapping turtle."

"There's probably a good reason for that," he added, rather buzzkillishly.

Bowden did add that the Algonquin name for the pond was "Dubbadoo," which roughly translates to "the place where the Monitor Lizard-sized turtle lives."

Approaching Carter's Bridge, site of the Turtle Sightings

All of these experts only get in the way of a good Monster Turtle Story. What we need to do is Field Research.

We put on the battle gear, loaded the car and weaved up Bournedale Road/Herring Pond Road, heading into the belly of the beast. We had consumed a large lunch, and partook in some fortifying liquid refreshments.

Of course we were armed!

"Remember, you have to shoot him in the head. His shell can withstand depleted uranium rounds, " I told Jessica needlessly.

"He doesn't scare me a bit. I'll make soup out of him," she replied.

I gave her a serious look. "That's what Doctor Neverwas said before the turtle ate her."

"Doctor Neverwas?"

"OK, I just made her up. Let's park here." I pulled the Volkswagen off onto the shoulder, crushing a dozen saplings.

Missing shoe of a turtle victim?

The people at the car rental place thought it was odd that I wanted a green Volkswagen Beetle, but it is the most turtle-looking car I could think of, and it is important to Go Native in these sorts of situations. I was insistent, and they eventually found me one somewhere.

My man Cranberry Jones and assistant editor Stacey Monponsett pulled up shortly after with the U-Haul. We were planning to not only find this turtle, but to capture him. I'm not sure how much money you can make with a 400 pound killer turtle, but I know that you can make money with such a beast.

"Starve it, sell tickets, feed it steroids, and have a dwarf fight it with a sledgehammer," said Jones, which is why I'm writing this column instead of him. "OK, the dwarf has to be drunk."

"Build a miniature city, teach him to walk upright through it, and make a monster movie," said Stacey, who is too young to have seen Gamera movies.

I was envisioning a scenario where we get it on The Late Late Show, and one of us (whoever has the best Turtle voice, probably Stacey) just hides behind the couch and speaks for him. It would help soften his image some if he got some jokes off, especially if Gamera got all anti-social and bit that chubby little English guy.

Fortunately, it never came to that. We struck out like A-Rod in a playoff game. The four of us have maybe zero (0) hours of turtle-hunting experience, and a turtle hunt is right where a flaw like that becomes apparent.

However, our ineptitude as turtle hunters should not obscure the fact that there is something very strange going on in Great Herring Pond.

Jess has a better camera....

The Pilgrim Curse: Expanding The Bridgewater Triangle

Are We Living In America's Epicenter Of Evil?

The first Thanksgiving was a positive experience. People from different cultures got together for a celebration. No one killed each other, and English/Wampanoag relations never looked better.

One group of diners were the locals, the people who had roamed Plimoth for thousands of years.The others were the newcomers, who chose to share their first good harvest with the people who helped them survive their first winter. Gods were thanked, bread was broken, and a good time was had by all.

Massasoit Ousamequin was the Man at that dinner. Someone else hosted, but only Massasoit's will kept the first Thanksgiving from being the Plimoth Massacre and maybe Roanoke II. Massasoit not only spared the vulnerable Pilgrims, but he helped them survive their first Starving Time.

Stuff then, as tends to be the case over the years with relations between two groups of people, happened.

55 years after this first Thanksgiving, Massasoit's son returned to Plimoth. He didn't come in peace... he came in pieces. His head went up on a stake for 20 years, and the Plimoth children may have even played soccer with it now and then.

In between these two visits to Plimoth by Wampanoag sachems, a whole bunch of mess went down. That, in itself, is a story for the ages. But the drama went on long after the end of King Phillip's War.

I'm not the man to tell you that Jesus God is better than Wampanoag God. I can't tell you if the Gods favored one side more than the other. All I can tell you is that, ever since the deal went down, the whole region has been a little bit strange. I'm not the only one who thinks so.

It's a long story, with a lot of proof to be given. The short version is that the land we walk on today might be cursed. We'll get back to the curse in a minute, but let's go through some of the results of this curse first.

This story owes a huge debt to a man named Loren Coleman. Mr. Coleman is a folklorist, a television personality, an author and the owner of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

He is also the guy who invented the Bridgewater Triangle. This theory claims that there is heightened paranormal activity in a wedge-shaped area running roughly between Abington, Rehoboth and Freetown.

It's a take-off on the Bermuda Triangle story, but very different in character.

This area has been host to UFO sightings, Bigfoot encounters, reports of giant snakes, travelers mystified by orbs of light, children brought to tears by spotting birds that could carry them off, parents on the watch for evil clowns and scores of other spooky situations.

This terrifying Triangle lays in a dismal, sparsely populated region of Eastern Massachusetts. It is almost entirely rural in nature, based in the Hockomock ("where the spirits dwell") Swamp.

Even in a state with very high population density, people are few and far between in the Bridgewater Triangle.  If you aren't from the Bridgewater Triangle, you don't go into the Bridgewater Triangle.

This is even more true after the sun sets...

Not to differ with the guy who invented the theory and did all of my research for me already, but I think that Loren Coleman made a crucial mistake when he decided on the parameters of his Triangle. Sportswriters shouldn't disagree with guys who own cryptozoological museums on cryptozoological matters unless they feel that they have unbeatable proof, and, well, here I am.

Loren's error came when he drew the borders. He didn't think Big.

New England itself is a strange place. It's as old as anything in the country, and much older than most of it. We had ghost stories that were over 200 years old before anyone even thought about founding Seattle. Dogtown, Massachusetts was founded, lived in, abandoned and haunted before we got around to adding Texas or Michigan to the flag stars.

We have several sorts of spooky. We have the sea monsters and shipwrecks covered, we have the haunted woods thing down, and you don't want to go near our mountains.

Coleman's version of the Triangle covers several towns. It should cover several states.

I say this simply because the stuff outside of the Triangle is worse than the stuff in the Triangle. Once you even start looking over the respective Players, you realize that the current Bridgewater Triangle is actually a safe area that you'd want to seek refuge in once you started tallying up the Spookiness that exists just outside of her borders.

The Bridgwater Triangle's main weakness is that it isn't really known for anything distinct. The biggest name you see on her roster is Bigfoot, who belongs spiritually to a whole other coast. The Triangle isn't really even the scary epicenter of Massachusetts, a title that goes- in a rout- to Salem.

Perhaps the Triangle rules on a per capita basis, as it runs through the sparsely populated backwaters of Plymouth and Bristol Counties. However, even someone bringing straight disrespeck couldn't argue that the Triangle wouldn't hold her own as a part of a larger spooky region.

Let's redefine that region so that the scary parts are actually included in the scary part.

Taking the Triangle to the Southwest immediately solves the Celebrity problem, and I mean taking it ten miles Southwest. That brings us into Fall River, and we all know who the First Lady of Fall River is.

Even if you want to disqualify Lizzie Borden for being non-paranormal, her house still stands today, and people say it's haunted. She's also just the top dog in a crowded pound.

Fall River, and her sister city New Bedford, have the worst crime rates in Massachusetts. New Bedford and her hinterlands had a never-captured serial killer, as well as the tavern that the Jodie Foster movie was about. America's first Giant Monster story began in New Bedford. Fall River, not to be outdone, had a Satanic cult to keep up the evil after Lizzie Borden died.

Fall River would make a nice corner of an expanded Triangle, and you could make a fierce argument to keep the Triangle in Massachusetts, but that would leave out Rhode Island.

Rhodey represents hard. She's a little state, but she has two very spooky incidents in her past.

One of these is ultra-paranormal. In 1892 (yes, 1892), the farm regions of southern Rhode Island succumbed to vampire fever. The Brown family suffered a series of consumption (tuberculosis) deaths, with one of the victims reporting having been visited by her deceased sister Mercy during the night.

Mercy and her sisters were dug up, and- lo and behold- Mercy Brown didn't look that bad. Her nails and teeth seemed to have grown, and was that blood in her mouth? The locals didn't quite process that bodies can be preserved in cold, that nails and teeth will appear to grow as skin decays, and so forth.

Mercy got the full vampire treatment. Her heart was removed, torched on a rock that is still there today (Exeter, RI), and the ashes were fed to her ailing brother, who soon after died of consumption.

Remember, this was about 200 years after the Salem Witch Trials, about 10 years before the Wright Brothers got a plane in the air and less than 20 years before Ronald Reagan was born.

If vampires don't spill enough blood for your liking, Rhodey was also the host for several crucial sections of King Phillip's War, the bloodiest per person war in US history.

The Great Swamp Fight went down in South Kingstown, R.I. in December of 1675. The colonial militia were led to a five acre fort where the Narragansett tribe was based. Attacking across a frozen swamp, they caught the Narragansett tribe slipping, and they burned the fort to the ground.

Women, children and elderly were slaughtered, and the warriors- the only ones to escape the carnage- were forced to fall in with Metacom. Everyone else perished or was sold into slavery, and the battleground is said to be haunted.

AKA "the Great Swamp Massacre," it pretty much finished off the Narragansett as a force in New England. The tribe never gave up their identity, and gained federal recognition in 1983. If they get a casino, they may yet enjoy the last laugh.

Of course, the thesis of the article is that they got the last laugh via a curse, but we'll get to that. We first have a Triangle to redesign.

Rhode Island deserves the corner office, because, if a curse was uttered, it was most likely uttered in Rhode Island.

It may even have been uttered by Metacom, the eponymous King Phillip of the colonial war fame. He met his maker in a Mount Hope marsh known as Misery Swamp. He was drawn and quartered, and his head was displayed on a pike outside Plimoth for 20 years.

Things like state lines mean little to nearly-wiped-out Wampanoags, who would view them as just another lie the Other Man was telling. They also mean little to the Gods, who might be the ones who truly dole out the curses. There is no record of Metacom uttering a curse, but they also didn't have Twitter back then.

While giving Rhodey the corner office, I'd stretch the Triangle out past them into the sea.

The pointy part of our Triangle (I spent most of my last Geometry class staring at legs, and retained little technical vocabulary) would then hook East, towards Cape Cod and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.

Block Island Sound, Nantucket Sound and Cape Cod have a nautical history, and a nautical history generally includes lots of spooky stuff like ghost ships, buried treasure, false-light mooncussers, town-smashing storms, Nessie-looking sea monsters, bloodthirsty pirates and all-hands-lost shipwrecks.

Cape Cod sort of rules the roost, however. The white man's history here starts with what may have been a grave robbing, and it went downhill afterwards.

While paying respect to the Whydah shipwreck, the numerous British raids, the ship graveyard just offshore, Suicide Alley, the scores of ghosts/haunted houses, Captain Ahab, two leap-to-your-death bridges (ironically, the suicide launching pads that are the Bourne and Sagamore Bridges were both Great Depression projects), the hurricanes/nor'easters/blizzards and the Great White Shark population... the creepiest thing about Cape Cod would involve their most charismatic residents.

Cape Cod's most famous family is only here during the summer, and almost-but-not-all of their spooky stuff happened in places like Dallas and Los Angeles. However, their presence in Hyannis Port, much like the presence of Lizzie Borden in Fall River or Mercy Brown in Rhode Island, pretty much forces Cape Cod into any reasonable discussion of Massachusetts' stranger regions.

The Kennedy family are awash in murder, bootlegging, conspiracy theories and crashing various vehicles into various bodies of water. The family is widely believed to be cursed.

Check the list:

- JFK's murder is still America's greatest conspiracy theory

- RFK's murder is when you first started thinking "Curse."

- Old Man Kennedy was a sort of bootlegger, with ties to the mob.

- An older Kennedy (Joe II, maybe?) was killed in WWII.

- A wild Kennedy daughter was lobotomized and dumped in an institution.

- Ted drove his Presidential hopes off a Martha's Vineyard bridge.

- JFK Jr. and his perfect wife crashed a plane off of Martha's Vineyard.

The only curses that could rival the Kennedy Curse (which may be just a wealthy neighborhood part of the Pilgrim Curse) are the Tecumseh curse, the Von Erich curse, the Billy Goat curse, the Scottish Play curse and the former Curse Of The Bambino.

Cape Cod can also match the Triangle in Stones. The Triangle boasts Dighton Rock, Anawan Rock, and even the Devil's Footprint. They say that Plymouth also has a rock of some reputation.

The town of Bourne has two. One, pictured above, is Sacrifice Rock, aka Chamber Rock. This is where, according to legend, God used lightning to intervene in a pagan sacrifice, splitting the rock in the process.

The other famous rock in Bourne is the Bourne Stone, which has some unidentifiable scribbling on it. It may be Viking, it may be Wampanoag, it may have been a colonial goofing around and it may even be from a guy named Hanno The Navigator. At least one historian thinks that it says "A Proclamation. Of Annexation. Do Not Deface. By This, Hanno Takes Possession."

If that is what it really says, it means that an African (Hanno was from Carthage, and is also the guy who gave gorillas their English name... no mean feat for a guy who predates England) discovered America about 2000 years before Columbus found it, and about 500 years before Jesus drew breath. This interpretation is wildly contested, however.

It is funny to note that a stone which would basically tear the first few chapters out of any American History textbook is barely mentioned when discussing all of the other oddities in the area. It's also funny that the Bourne Stone isn't the most famous Rock in the area, or even the most famous carved-upon rock.

Bourne also has a haunted hotel, the Quality Inn (former Best Western), just off the Bourne Bridge.

At this point, we'd turn another corner on our Triangle and head NW... probably just in time, too.

Where you make the turn is up to some debate. It basically boils down to how much Ship Graveyard you want in the Triangle. I suppose that you could set it out where the Titanic sank if you wanted to, although a run of beach from Wellfleet to Truro alone has seen over a thousand shipwrecks. That should be enough for most folks.

A lot of our folklore is nautical, and this corner of the Triangle would be chock full of benthic beasties. As you round Cape Cod and head north through the sea, you'll encounter reports of sea serpents in Duxbury and Gloucester. The witness in the Duxbury case was no less than Daniel Webster. Hull also has a strong sea serpent history. Henry Hudson claimed to have seen a mermaid in our Triangle's area in 1609. Nantucket had a Globster. Truro had a Beast.

With Massachusetts being more of a nor'easter state than a hurricane state, the South Shore is where you get the more frequent storm damage. Generally, every winter has at least one bad storm, and you get a homewrecker every 20 years or so.... or every other year or so, if that global warming stuff is true.

As we come back onto the mainland after leaving Cape Cod, we get into Plymouth. Plymouth has a major role in this story, and we'll bring them back into the mix at the end.

The South Shore has no shortage of creepy history. A lot of the interior is in the Coleman version of the Triangle, and it would serve you better to let others discuss it. I always favored Kristen Good's work.

Offhand, I'd mention hauntings at the Phillips Mansion in Marshfield, the Sun Tavern in Duxbury, Cemetery Hill in Plymouth, Gurnet Light, the Jerusalem Road child statue in Cohasset, Hanover Town Hotel, Bear Cove Park in Hingham, the Marsh People of Wareham, Fort Warren and the Lady In Black from Hull, vanishing women (sometimes blue) strolling the shores of Onset, Duxbury and Sagamore Beaches, a second Sacrifice Rock in Plymouth near the Pine Hills, the USS Salem in Quincy, the First Cliff ghost ship off Scituate, and the Man In Black of Weymouth.

I would make sure that the revised Triangle avoids Boston, while perhaps cutting the edge close enough to include the Boston Harbor islands. Boston is sort of her own Triangle. I also purposefully avoid Providence.

It is important to touch land twice more. For starters, if your paranormal Triangle doesn't include Salem, your paranormal Triangle is whick-whick-whack. Moving it inland to Danvers gives us a better abandoned hospital than the one (in Hanson) in the picture above.

Salem has witches, witch trials, voodoo, hangings, mass hysteria, insanity, curses, and the Devil himself at times. No respectable Triangle could skip Gallows Hill.

To be honest, and I am guilty of it myself... any Massachusetts paranormal triangle that isn't named after and centered on Salem is sort of like putting Fredo in charge of the Corleone family.

Gloucester would also be an important player in the mix. Not only do they have a history of having their sons swallowed up by the sea, but they also have the strongest claim on a sea monster in New England (and perhaps American) history.

A run from Mattapoisett around Cape Cod and up to Boston would also give you all of Massachusetts' fatal (and, minus Nahant, non-fatal) shark attacks.

Salem, Danvers, Dogtown, Arkham and Gloucester could quite easily secede and form their own Triangle, but we'll keep them in this one as the Anchorman.

I apologize for the awful Triangle. Longtime readers may draw a connection between my inability to draw straight lines and the reason why Jessica takes all of the good pictures.

I run the Triangle up to Portland for a few reasons. For starters, a nice wide turn around Cape Cod covers most of the ship graveyard. Some of the worse ones were way offshore. You probably don't want to stretch it to the Lusitania wreck, but the wreck of the Portland (of Portland Gale fame) off of Gloucester might be a good spot for a border.

Running it up to Portland sort of Xs out New Hampshire, but that's the way the granite crumbles. They sort of lost their spot when the Old Man In The Mountains fell. New Hampshire does have some creepy stuff, but it my be under the thumb of the nearby Bennington Triangle. If I brought NH into it, I'd go with wherever the Hill family got "abducted."

We also sort of cut off western/central Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and New York. This is costly, as it costs us Sleepy Hollow, the Amityville Horror, the house from A Haunting In Connecticut, a lot of King Phillip's War battleground, and the Dover Demon... who "most likely" wandered over from the nearby Bridgewater Triangle anyhow.

Maine is important for celebrity-type reasons. New England, and especially coastal New England, has a sea-lion's share of he horror market down. Movies, books, TV shows... to tie it to a running thesis in this article, we over-represent.

I have no intention of doing a Google search for this, because I'm pretty sure that I can come off the top of my head with a pretty good triangle list.

- Moby Dick starts in New Bedford and moves to Nantucket. Every guy with authority on the Pequod was from the expanded Triangle, and I think Ishmael was, too.

- I need to read me some more Lovecraft, but I'm pretty sure that his mythos has a coastal region around Salem.

- Hawthorne had a few spooky stories set in Salem, another reason Salem sort of carries the title belt here.

- I think the guy on The X Files was from Nantucket or Martha.

- The inclusion of Maine is, uhm, mainly done to include two very important people. One would be Stephen King, who is in enough people's nightmares to force the issue. His stomping ground is Maine. I think he may live in Lewiston, but he likes his privacy, and Portland is easier to use. I do think that Salem's Lot was set in the Falmouth/Cumberland area, so Portland is close enough.

Besides....

If I feel the need to alter some better researcher's Triangle, you sort of have to tip your hat to the man.

Why not end this expanded Triangle to the business of the Triangle Man himself, Loren Coleman? Draw that final corner of this Triangle right through the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

This gives us a Triangle with points in Portland, the waters off Rhode Island and the open ocean off Cape Cod. It has elements of Coleman's inland, rural Triangle, while also adding elements from the more well-known Bermuda Triangle.

It is a large section of country, maybe a bit less than 10% of the New England land mass, with X amount of open ocean.

No other area really matches it. New York, as we mentioned, has a Sleepy Hollow/Amityville Horror mix, and NYC is always frightening. The Jersey Devil lives nearby, as does the Montauk Monster. Maryland holds her own with the Blair Witch and Edgar Allen Poe, but she sort of wears out when New England starts stacking more chips on the table.

Godzilla, King Kong, Rodan, the Cloverfield monster and every asteroid movie ever has attacked NYC. Hollywood shames Stephen King and Lovecraft. Cascadia has Bigfoot, and Vermont has Champ.

Still, my Triangle beats 'em, It might be on a per capita basis, like King Phillip's War, but it wins.

Speaking of which....

It's not fair to put the blame for casting the curse on the Wampanoags.

They were living in relative harmony before the Other Man arrived. I'm pretty sure that the Vikings killed a bunch of natives, and some of the first Euros to check out New England may have kidnapped some locals (this is how Squanto and Samoset learned their English). These explorers also coughed a bunch of European germs onto the locals, who- due to geographic isolation- had no natural resistance. This is why the perfectly useful port of Plimoth was empty when the English arrived.

The Wampanoags fared worse from the exchange than the English did, which makes it unlikely that they were the ones casting the Curse. The Wampanoag plague, which did the most damage to either side, went down probably 20 years before Metacom was even born. That sort of eliminates him from Curser status.

The plague also eliminates the Pilgrims- who arrived after a series of illnesses wiped out 90% of the local population- from contention, but "The Pilgrim Curse" just sounds cool, to be quite frank.

If you take the Vikings out of the equation, you can pretty much trace the source of the Curse- cast by either a tribal dissident opposed to the very first meeting of European and Native American, or by the Gods themselves- to some encounter between explorers/fishermen and the Wampanoags. Gosnold, Smith, Champlain and Hudson all worked the area, and they were followed by the more ballsy of the European fishermen.

Just for laughs, let's set the date to 1605, which is when Squanto, or Tisquantum, was kidnapped by Captain Weymouth. Weymouth, I might add, was an early and miserably failed colonial town that was briefly abandoned.

"Tisquantum" is a Wampanoag word for "divine rage." It was most likely not his real name. When he introduced himself to the English as Tisquantum, he was essentially a kidnapping victim saying "Englishmen, I am the wrath of God."

The English stabbed his people in the back anyhow. Perhaps Squanto, who had been exposed to European culture numerous (he sailed across the Atlantic six times with very superstitious sailors) times and may have had knowledge of curses, tried one out. Perhaps curses can work retroactively. Perhaps the gods saw it coming, and launched a pre-emptive strike on both sides.

The region has been strange ever since. Not many regions are stranger.

Fear the sunset in Cranberry County....