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....
