The Ghostly Nuns of Dudley Road

Haunted roads. Doesn't that phrase sound magical? There's just something really evocative about combining those two words. There's real synergy there; the whole is greater than its parts.

Haunted roads are appealing because they remind me of my adolescence, driving around aimlessly with friends waiting for something to happen. The lure of a haunted road has stuck with me into adulthood, and I've been to a few different haunted roads recently: Route 44, Albino Road, and Ghost Road. But just recently I went to what is supposed to be the most haunted road in Massachusetts: Dudley Road in Billerica.

There are several legends associated with Dudley Road, many of them focused on nuns. The most lurid story claims that back in the 19th century a group of nuns from a local convent decided to worship Satan. They would sneak out of the convent at night and gather in an abandoned house for their sinister rituals. Eventually the locals figured out what was happening and hanged the nuns in a nearby field.

St. Thecla's Retreat Center, run by the Sisters of St. Paul, is on Dudley Road

Apparently the spirits of Devil-worshipping nuns don't rest easily, because according to local legends they have been seen wandering around the road at night, and in particular haunt the field where they were hanged. Since their deaths the house where they celebrated the Black Mass has slowly been sinking into the ground. Is it descending to Hell? Strange smells and sounds emanate from the building at night.

Creepy stuff! There are also other legends about ghost nuns. One claims that a nun was hit by a car late one night while walking home to the convent. She was killed instantly when the impact knocked her into a tree, but her ghost still haunts Dudley Road. Some say she can be seen lurking under the tree her body was thrown against, while others say that she wanders the road at night asking for directions back to the convent. She is, quite literally, a lost soul.

Is this house sinking into the earth?

Another legend claims that a nun from the convent became pregnant after having an affair with a priest. She hanged herself in shame and her ghost can still be seen haunting the tree where she died. These stories share similar elements - ghosts, nuns, trees, hangings - but are all slightly different. Everyone seems to agree that something bad happened but the legends differ over what it was.

Not all the ghosts are nuns. A man dressed like a farm-worker is also said to haunt the road at night. He stands by the side of the road just under the trees, his face perpetually hidden in shadow. Don't stop if you see him. Just keep driving.

When Tony and I drove down Dudley Road I was surprised how nice it was. There are a lot of large well-maintained homes and quite a few horse farms, but I guess even upscale neighborhoods have ghosts. Parts of the road seemed new but other parts were older. The older parts were narrow and quite twisty with Colonial era homes and bordered by lichen-encrusted stone walls. I can easily see how creepy legends could get attached to this street. We only visited during the day - I imagine it is much spookier at night.

The stories about Dudley Road seem to be at least several decades old. Commenters on this post claim they heard the stories at least thirty years ago, and others say they were told the story by their parents. A few commenters even say the stories are true and that they have seen some of the ghosts.

I am not a debunker; people may very well see strange things on this road. However, I don't think the story about the hanged nuns is corroborated by any historical records. The last people executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts were hanged in Salem in 1692, so it's very, very unlikely that anyone was  killed in the early nineteenth century for Devil worship. And the house that is supposedly sinking into the ground looks a lot like a storage building to me. It also has big "No trespassing" signs posted on it so please stay away.

So if the nun legend isn't true why do people see ghost nuns? I don't know for sure, but I do think New England has it's own psychic landscape which is influenced by history, the people living on it, and the land itself. New England has it's own folkloric personality. Some people might find old houses, stone walls and dense woods charming, but other might experience them as creepy, particularly at night. A commenter on that post claimed that his teenage son went to Dudley Road with some friends on a lark, but things didn't go quite as planned. He returned home terrified and in tears. Was it all in the boy's head, or did he encounter something that only manifests to people who have the right mindset?

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments. I would love to hear from some people who have seen strange things on Dudley Road.

Mary Toothaker and the Devil's Protection

Although it is warm and sunny out I am in the mood for witchcraft stories. Honestly I am always in the mood for witchcraft, but this month is always the busiest period at my day job, and I think I crave tales of the bizarre and supernatural as an antidote.

So here's a story, which is lurid, upsetting, and weirdly ironic. It comes from the Salem witch trials. The more I read about those dark days the more strange stories I find. This particular one is about a woman named Mary Toothaker, a woman whose life was saved by her confession.

Mary Toothaker lived in Billerica with her husband Roger and daughter Martha. Roger had a reputation as a folk-healer and bragged that he could fight witches with magic. When the witch trials broke out he was naturally accused of witchcraft - it's a fine line between white and black magic, after all - and eventually died in jail. In the summer of 1692 Mary was accused of witchcraft as well.

In addition to being accused of tormenting the usual gaggle of afflicted Salem girls, Mary was also accused of bewitching Timothy Swan of Andover. There was bad blood between Swan and Mary's family. In 1687 he had been accused of raping her relative Elizabeth Emerson, holding his arm against her throat so she could not cry out for help. He was acquitted of rape, but the court still ordered him to pay child support for the child Emerson conceived after his assault.

Swan later contracted a mysterious illness (which eventually killed him in 1693). During her trial, Mary Toothaker confessed that she had hurt Swan using witchcraft, and in particular that her specter had "squeezed his throat." An eye for an eye, I suppose. But revenge (according to her confession) was not the sole reason she had become a witch. The Devil had promised her safety.

It's hard to imagine now, but in 1692 Massachusetts consisted primarily of small rural villages. The colony was merely decades old, and its future was uncertain. The biggest threat came from the local Indians, who were allied with the French. Indian raids were a constant concern for English settlers in Massachusetts, and this concern was only magnified in the 1690s when Essex County was flooded with refugees fleeing Indian attacks in Maine. Billerica is now a cute bedroom community, but when Mary Toothaker lived there in the 1600s it was a frontier settlement whose residents feared for their lives.

So when Mary gave herself to the Devil, she asked for safety from Indian attacks for her and her son, a war veteran who had been wounded in a skirmish with Indians. The Devil, who appeared as a man with a dark complexion, agreed. Mary signed away her soul on a piece of birch bark.

At least that's what she confessed. No one who confessed during the Salem trials was executed, so it was the smart thing to do on Mary's part. After hearing her initial testimony the judges sent her to Salem's jail until they determined her sentence.

Two days later, on August 1, 1692, an Indian raiding party attacked Billerica. Most of Mary's neighbors were killed. It's very likely that if she had been home she would have died as well. Several days later the Indians returned and burned down the Toothaker farm, which was unoccupied.

In 1693 Mary was declared innocent of witchcraft and released from jail. She returned to Billerica with her 12 year old daughter Margaret. A few years later, on February 1, 1695 another Indian raiding party attacked Billerica. Mary was killed. Her daughter taken away as a captive and disappeared from the historical records.

I found this story in historian Emerson Baker's new book A Storm of Witchcraft. Baker speculates that Mary may have actually thought herself a witch. Her family did practice magic, and perhaps she thought Timothy Swan's suffering was caused by her own hatred of him. That's hard to determine, but her fear of Indian attacks was shared by most English settlers, and it's interesting that the Devil appeared to her as a dark-skinned man and that she signed a piece of bark rather than the more traditional European style book that is mentioned in other accounts. It makes sense to ally yourself with what you fear. Her confession provides a good window into the mindset of the time.

I don't think there was any unusual supernatural agency at work here, but it's odd that Mary was safest when she was locked up in jail. She got her wish for protection, even if only for a while.