Seductive New England Witches, Part Two: The Freetown Forest Witch

Last week I wrote about A.O. Spare, the British art world, and witchcraft. This week I'm bringing the witchcraft back to New England for a particularly creepy story.

It comes from Christopher Balzano's Dark Woods: Cults, Crime and the Paranormal in the Freetown State Forest. I highly recommend this book if you like your folklore scary and weird. Balzano interviewed people who live near Massachusetts's Freetown Forest and also researched some uncanny occurrences that happened there. The result is a collection of spooky - and allegedly true - stories like this one.

Dave (no last name given) grew up in a rural area in southern Massachusetts. His backyard abutted the Freetown State Forest, and as a boy he and his friends liked to play in the thick woods. The forest has more than 50 miles of unpaved roads and covers more than 5,000 acres, so there was plenty of space for the boys to play.

There was also plenty of space for strange things to happen. One day when he was six, Dave and a friend were in the woods when they heard someone laughing at them. They thought they could see someone hiding in the trees nearby, but when they tried to get a closer look it seemed as though the light was refracting strangely around the laughing figure, making it hard to see. Both boys were terrified and ran home. They kept their encounter secret.

Dave didn't encounter anything strange again until he was ten, when he had a very vivid dream. He dreamed he was an adult male walking through the woods towards a small house. He carried an axe in one hand. When he entered the small house he saw a middle-aged woman with long gray hair making love to a Native American man. In a jealous rage he killed them both, but as he did the woman glared at him not with fear, but with hatred and evil.

OK. Let me just interject to say that's one freaky dream for a ten-year old to have. But more on that later. Back to David's story ...

The Freetown State Forest.

Things got really weird for Dave and the other boys in the neighborhood over the next few years. One day while the boys were out walking in the woods when they came upon the foundation of an old house. Dave recognized it as the ruins of the house he had seen in his dream. This discovery spurred discussion among the boys, and as they talked they all realized they had recently seen the same gray-haired woman. She often appeared outside their bedroom windows at night, begging to come in, while the boys hovered in the space between wakefulness and sleep. They all thought she might be a witch.

Only one of the boys had invited her to enter his bedroom. The results were disastrous. She forced herself on the boy, which terrified him. His parents had to break down the bedroom door to reach their screaming son, who lay in bed as if someone was holding him down. The family eventually moved away from the Freetown State Forest.

Dave had his own nighttime visit from the witch, which he claims happened while he was awake. He sometimes saw a white figure following him in the woods and heard the eerie laughter he had heard years ago. He also told Balzano that he had seen a large black cat in the area. Black cats aren't that unusual, but this one walked on its rear legs.

The witch definitely was scary, but despite this Dave and some of the boys became obsessed with her. They visited the old foundation repeatedly, and one of Dave's friends would wander through the woods trying to find her.

The witchy phenomena quieted down as Dave got older. He hasn't seen the witch for many years. He moved out of his parents' house, and has a girlfriend and a child. He still gets nervous when he goes to visit his parents at his old house near the woods, though.

******

I really like this story. Yes, it's spooky, but it reminds me of the stories I'd hear when I was just a kid, sitting on my back porch in the late summer. Plus, I love a good New England witch story.

First off, let's get something out of the way. Is this story true? I have no way to tell. Balzano says the Freetown Historical Society has no record of anyone living in the woods, but the ruins of the house seem to be real. I also don't recall any famous witch cases from that area, but that doesn't mean strange things don't still happen. 

The Freetown State Forest.

Rather than trying to prove or debunk it, I think it's more interesting to look at what's happening in Dave's story,  For example, it's interesting to compare this story with last week's post about Austin Osman Spare and Mrs. Paterson. Both involve older female witches trying to seduce teenage boys. Austin Spare found the experience liberating and enlightening; Dave and his friends were terrified. Can it just be chalked up to Spare's artistic sensibility? Maybe, but perhaps the Freetown boys were just much more aware that even women can be sexual abusers. 

If I were a Freudian analyst, and not just someone who read some Freud in college, I'd probably make a lot out of Dave's dream where he is an adult male killing the witch and her lover. That feels like some heavy-duty Oedipal symbolism to me. That dream also somehow kicks off several years of unpleasantly sexual witch-haunting as the boys work their way through puberty. The haunting seems to have stopped when Dave and friends reached full maturity. It all seems to make symbolic sense.

Finally, what exactly who or what was this mysterious woman? The boys called her a witch because of her appearance, and the black cat seems to support them. She's also a ghost. I've mentioned on this blog before that witches tend to live on after death, so that's not really surprising. She also reminds me of the rapacious succubi, seductive female demons that appear in Medieval folklore. 

Witch? Ghost? Demon? Maybe the forest just shows us what we're looking for. Balzano writes that "the paranormal is often defined by the people who experience it," so it makes sense that teenage boys who lived on the edge of a big New England forest experienced what they did. 

Tony and I have actually been to the Freetown State Forest. We didn't see any ghostly witches, but did find the woods there kind of unsettling. So if you go looking for the witch use caution. Who knows what you might find there yourself?

Pukwudgies in Freetown: Some Fairy Sightings in Massachusetts

Are there little magical people (fairies, if you will) hiding in the woods of New England? Most people would tell you no, but those who have actually seen them would disagree. And the fairies in these parts aren't the cute little ballerinas in tutus that you might expect. Like the landscape, they're rough and more than a little craggy.

It's only recently that legends about New England fairies have become popular, and there's a historical reason for that. 

When the Puritans came to these shores in the 17th century they brought a lot of their folklore with them. They brought their stories about witches and ghosts, and also their stories about the Devil.

This was portable folklore and wasn't specifically tied to the Puritans' old homeland of England. The Puritans thought that witches could be found among their own neighbors and friends here in the New World, and ghosts could be found wherever someone died under duress. And of course, the Devil could be found anywhere in the world.

The Puritans left behind other folklore, though, which was firmly tied to the English landscape. Stories of dragons and ogres didn't cross the Atlantic, nor did stories about fairies. Fairies were believed to reside in specific landscape features like hills or ancient burial mounds, or were attached to ancestral castles. The Puritans left those sites behind when they left England, and left the fairies with them.

Several New England writers commented on lack of fairies in New England. Sylvester Judd, a Unitarian minister of the 19th century, noted that, "There are no fairies in our meadows, and no elves to spirit away our children."

Massachusetts poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote in a similar vein: "Fairy faith is, we may safely say, now dead everywhere ... It never had much hold upon the Yankee mind, our superstitions being mostly of a sterner and less poetical kind."

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne expressed similar thoughts. Although his novel The Scarlet Letter is full of witchcraft and divine omens, heroine Hester Prynne says the following of her child Pearl: "But how strangely beautiful she looks, with those wild flowers in her hair! It as if one of the fairies, whom we left in our dear old England, had decked her out to meet us."

Now I don't want to contradict Whittier or Hawthorne, but there were fairies here in New England. A few English settlers brought their beliefs with them, but the Native Americans who had long called this area home had rich traditions about small magical people who lived here.

For example, the Mohegans tell of the makiawisug, small beings who live under Mohegan Hill in Montville, Connecticut, while the Passamaquoddy of Maine tell stories of the benevolent nagumwasuck and the deadly meckumwasuck. The Penobscot have legends about small helpful beings called wanagumeswak, as well as more dangerous creatures like alambegwinosis, the underwater dwarf man.

Stories about these fairy-like creatures were written down in the 19th century, but didn't find a wide audience. Perhaps it's because their Algonquin language names were difficult for English speaking whites to pronounce, or perhaps it's because readers wanted stories about pretty whimsical fairies with diaphanous wings, not small hairy humanoids lurking in rivers and trees. Whatever the reason, these indigenous fairies were not particularly well-known outside of Native American communities.

That changed in 1934, when Elizabeth Reynard published The Narrow Land: Folk Chronicles of Old Cape Cod. Her book included many Wampanoag legends which were told to her by Wampanoag chieftain Clarence Wixon. Wixon was involved with the Pan-Indian movement, and actually used an Ojibwa term to describe the region's fairies to Reynard: pukwudgee. Sometimes also spelled pukwudgie, for some reason the term caught on with general readers and was even popularized in a 1980s children's book, The Good Giants and the Bad Pukwudgies.

Okay. That was a long introduction, but here's the main point of the post. Recently Tony and I went to the Freetown State Forest in Massachusetts. People have seen pukwudgies there. They are not pretty or whimsical, but are small, hairy and seemingly malevolent.

 

Christopher Balzano's wonderful book Dark Woods: Cults, Crime and the Paranormal in the Freetown State Forest contains two pukwudgie accounts. They are both kind of creepy.

In the first, a woman named Joan claims she was walking her dog in the forest on a spring day in the 1990s. Her dog ran off the path and dragged her into the woods. When the dog finally stopped she found herself staring at a strange little being standing on a rock:

She describe him as looking like a troll: two feet high with pale gray skin and hair on his arms and the top of his head... His torso made up the majority of his body and he had very short legs. His eyes were deep green, and he had large lips and a long, almost canine nose.

Needless to say, Joan was shocked to see the creature. She stared at it. It stared at her. Finally the dog ran back to the path, pulling her away from the pukwudgie.

That's a weird encounter, but here's the really unsettling part. Several times after seeing the creature in the woods, Joan woke up in the middle of the night to see it staring in her bedroom window. AAAH! The nighttime visitations finally stopped when Joan moved to another county.

 

The second account in Dark Woods is told by a man named Tom. Tom first saw a pukwudgie when he was a teenager. He had snuck out of his parents house one night to walk in the woods to clear his mind. As he walked down a path he saw a glowing light:

I noticed a dim light, like in the form of a ball, in front of me. It was white and swelled, like it was breathing... It rose to about my shoulders and then flew into the woods. 

Tom followed the light down the path until it disappeared. As he turned to head back home he noticed he was not alone. A short man covered entirely in fur stood nearby. He was about two feet tall, and had a nose like a wolf. The man ran off into the trees with an unearthly moan.

Tom was (un)lucky enough to see a pukwudgie a second time. One night he drove to one of the Freetown State Forest's parking lots and sat in his car. He turned off the engine and the headlights and turned the radio down low, enjoying the solitude.

He soon realized he wasn't alone. Standing in the darkness staring at Tom was the same little man he had seen in the woods. The pukwudgie was about 20 feet away, and he could see its eyes glowing red in the night. Abruptly the engine of Tom's car came on of its own accord, and the radio suddenly blared loudly. In a panic Tom drove home.

Tony and I did not see any pukwudgies while we were in the Freetown State Forest, although there definitely times when the woods did feel quite creepy. What would we do if we did see one? I would probably run like heck for the car. But I think I'd also be thrilled to see one of New England's own fairies.

Ghosts of the Assonet Ledge

Yesterday Tony and I took a trip down to Freetown, Massachusetts to check out the Freetown State Forest. It was a beautiful day, so why not visit someplace reportedly full of weird paranormal activity?

I first read about the forest in Christopher Balzano's Dark Woods: Cults, Crime and and the Paranormal in the Freetown State Forest (2008). Balzano, a Massachusetts-based paranormal investigator, spent quite a bit of time talking with with Freetown residents about any strange experiences they may have had in the forest. As a result the book is mostly a collection of first-person accounts, which gives it an immediacy you don't find in books that are collections of older legends.

It also makes the book pretty creepy. The stories in it are the kind teenagers tell around a fire in the woods or that adults tell their close friends late at night after a few drinks. Ghosts? Little monsters? Serial killers? Undead witches? They're all in Dark Woods. To his credit, Balzano also acknowledges when there isn't any proof to back up a story, but that doesn't make these tales any less creepy.

Tony and I decided to focus our trip on the Assonet Ledge, a significant landmark in the Freetown Forest. (The word assonet is a Wampanoag word meaning "place of stones.") There are a variety of legends connected with the ledge, including stories of ghosts, weird lights, and malevolent little creatures.

Balzano proposes a few theories for why so many weird stories are associated with the Freetown State Forest. The area was possibly the site of Native American massacres at the hands of the Puritans, and it also sits inside the Bridgewater Triangle, an area notorious for paranormal phenomena.

After visiting the forest I can understand why it has a weird reputation. It was indeed creepy. I'm usually skeptical about the reality of paranormal phenomena, but as I've noted before it's easy for me to be a skeptic in the comfort of my well-lit house. Put me in the middle the woods and I'm more likely to at least admit the possibility of the supernatural. Put me in the middle of creepy woods and I'm almost a true believer!

Does this feel welcoming to you? Me neither!

Why was the Freetown State Forest so creepy? I suppose part of it was just the initial nervousness of being in a strange place, but part of it was the forest itself. Immediately after parking the path we were on led us through a grove of pine trees that had died from some type of infestation. Off in the distance we could hear gun shots from a firing range. I don't find either dead trees or random gunfire relaxing. I find them unnerving.

The walk to the ledge just got more unsettling as we went along. There were creaking trees - lots and lots of them. Eventually the creaking trees gave way to trees that moaned and banged against each other in the wind. Good Lord, get this city boy out of the woods! There was litter as well, and some graffiti. Were we going to meet woodland demons or surly teenagers? And which would be worse?

We didn't meet either. (We did meet some teens, but they weren't particularly surly.) However, once we got to the ledge we both stopped feeling unsettle. The ledge was really big - about 50 or 60 feet high - and despite some graffiti it was beautiful. It wasn't creepy, it was impressive.

He's hard to see, but there's a tiny person on top of this ledge. It's big!

I can understand why legends have formed around the Assonet Ledge. Here are just a few of them.

During the 17th century war between the Puritans and the Wampanoag and Narragansett Indians, several Indian warriors leapt to their deaths from the ledge rather than die at the hands of the English. Some visitors claim to have seen ghosts of Native Americans walking in the trees near the cliff. But as Balzano points out, the ledge and its pond didn't exist in the 17th century. Both are the result of 19th century granite quarrying. However, much of the land in the Freetown State Forest is actually a Wampanoag reservation, so there is an authentic Native American connection. Perhaps the ghosts died in some other way?

If that story doesn't strike your fancy, try this one. Many years ago, a young man and woman were deeply in love. They would meet secretly at the ledge at night because their families disapproved of their love. One night the woman arrived at the ledge and waited for her beau. She waited, and waited that night but he never came. In despair she threw herself off the ledge to her death in the cold water.

Tony and some perfectly well-behaved teens on top of the ledge.

Her spirit has haunted the ledge ever since. Many people have seen a woman's ghost walking along its top, and some have even seen her step off the edge. When she hits the water she disappears without even a splash.

It's hard to say if this story is true. It has all the hallmarks of a classic legend (doomed lovers, a ghost, etc.) but there has been at least one actual suicide at the ledge. In 2004 a man visiting the Assonet ledge leapt to his death in front of his friends and girlfriend. His family said he had no previous history of depression or ever expressed suicidal thoughts. In addition to this one authenticated suicide there are several that have been rumored, and some visitors to the ledge claim they've felt compelled to jump (but happily haven't).

Other weird phenomena beyond human ghosts have been encountered at the site. For example, glowing lights have been seen in the pond. Souls of people who died at the ledge, perhaps, or something else? The Freetown State Forest is said to be the stomping ground for Pukwudgies, small elfish creatures of Native American lore. I'll do a separate post about the Freetown Pukwudgies later, but they are said to delight in pushing people off cliffs...

Saying goodbye to the Assonet Ledge.

Tony and I didn't see any ghosts or Pukwudgies, and we definitely felt less creeped out as we walked back to the car.  I still don't think I'd want to spend the night in the Freetown State Forest, though. It's easier for me to be a skeptic here at home!

Movie Review: The Bridgewater Triangle

If you read this blog you're probably familiar with the Bridgewater Triangle, a large area in southeastern Massachusetts that's famous for a wide variety of strange phenomena. There's now a documentary about the Triangle, and I think its worth seeing.

I have three criteria for for judging non-fiction movies and TV shows about paranormal phenomena:

1. Did I learn something new?

2. Is it skillfully made?

3. Did it creep me out?

I'm usually satisfied if just one criterion is met. For example, I might enjoy watching a poorly made and laughably unscary show just because it teaches me about some new monster. "Oh, hey, I never knew there was a humanoid lizard monster in East Podunk. Cool!"


But happily, The Bridgewater Triangle meets all three. First, I did learn quite a few new things. I already knew that the Triangle's 200 square miles have been home to Bigfoot, giant black dogs, UFOs, monster snakes, and strange birds. But after watching I did learn that...

• The first UFOs in the area was seen by two undertakers on Halloween night in 1908!
• The red-headed hitchhiker of Route 44 has a rival, the mad trucker of Copicut Road, a phantom pickup truck that forces people off the road in the Freetown State Forest.
• In addition to Bigfoot, small orange ape-like creatures have been seen in the area.
• In 1993, a rare African cat called a serval was found dead on the Easton/Raynham border. Where did it come from?

The Bridgewater Triangle is also well-made and easily could air on any TV station. The film conveys its information through dramatic re-enactments, still photos, drawings, and a lot of interviews. The talking heads include paranormal investigators and cryptozoologists like Loren Coleman, Jeff Belanger, Tim Weisberg, Christopher Balzano, and Joseph DeAndrade, as well as former police officers, TV newscasters, and plenty of area residents. There's also lots of footage from notorious locations like the Hockomock Swamp, Anawan Rock, and the Freetown State Forest, giving the viewer a good feel for the area. Even suburban streets acquire a creepy vibe as the camera glides slowly past well-trimmed yards surrounded by deep, dark, woods...

I did find portions of The Bridgewater Triangle quite spooky. An account of some children seeing Bigfoot in 1970 creeped me out, as did Joseph DeAndrade's story about hearing a voice telling him to turn around while exploring a swamp. I won't tell you what he saw, but it was large and hairy!

For me, the creepiest part of the movie was the interview with Bill Russo, which is either a great report of a paranormal encounter or a fantastic campfire story.

In 1990 Russo lived in Raynham and worked the late shift. One night after midnight he took his dog for a walk near some high-tension power lines. As he walked through the deserted area he heard a high-pitched voice wailing the following words:

"Ee wah chu. Ee wah chu. Keer. Keer."

A strange creature stepped into the light cast by a streetlight. It was about three feet high, covered in brown hair, potbellied, and seemed to be old. It continued to cry out "Ee wah chu. Ee wah chu. Keer. Keer" and beckoned to Russo with one hand. It wanted him to join it.

"Ee wah chu..." Image from The Bridgewater Triangle documentary.

Russo didn't. He and his dog were both frightened and walked away as fast as they could. When Russo looked back the being was gone. Only after he got safely home did he realize it had been trying to say, "We want you. We want you. Come here. Come here." Creepy!

Even though it conjures a spooky atmosphere the movie includes multiple perspectives, and some of them are skeptical. Was the mysterious Dighton Rock carved by ancient Phoenicians or the medieval Portuguese? Well, maybe it was just carved by the local Indians. After all, one expert points out, it has the same carvings as documented Indian petroglyphs in Maine.

This inclusive viewpoint extends to explanations about the Bridgewater Triangle itself. Perhaps all the strange phenomena are the psychic residue of atrocities committee against Wampanoag Indians in the 1600s, or perhaps there's just something inherent in the land itself. Or maybe when we walk out into the dark woods or the gloomy swamp, something inside us that our modern society represses wakes up. The Bridgewater Triangle gives us an opportunity to fully experience something that is always with us but normally unseen.

If you like the paranormal and local folklore, or just like some scary stories, I would recommend watching The Bridgewater Triangle. It would also make a good Christmas or Halloween gift for that special person in your life. You can watch it online through Vimeo or buy the DVD. It's definitely worth 90 minutes of your time!

Special thank to Aaron Cadieux, one of the film's directors, for giving me free access to the movie online.