Rats, Cats, and Death: Horror on Haskell Island

Haskell Island is located off the coast of Harpswell, Maine. It's a small island, and apparently has no full time residents these days, just vacation homes. It looks quite idyllic, but like many quaint New England locales Haskell Island has a strange past. 

According to legend, the island was first colonized by the two Haskell brothers, way back in the 1600s. The Hakells were very industrious and transformed the island into an agricultural paradise. They planted an orchard, plowed the land into fertile fields, and fished in Casco Bay. The brothers prospered in their little Eden. 

Unfortunately, one day they accidentally brought some rats to the island in their boat while transporting supplies. Haskell Island had everything the rats could want: food, water, places to nest, and no predators. The rats multiplied rapidly and soon threatened the brothers' livelihood.

Antique Haskell Island postcard from Amazon. "A pretty place which I visited yesterday..."

To stop the rats, the Haskell brothers brought a couple of cats to their island. The brothers didn't provide any food for the cats and expected them to survive by killing rats. The cats met their expectations. They ate rats, and there were so many rats that the cats thrived and multiplied. Soon there were more cats than rats, and eventually there were no rats left at all, just an island full of hungry cats. 

The cats roved the island, howling with hunger. They climbed the apple trees, roamed the fields, and paced the shore, looking for something to kill and eat. 

The Haskell brothers had to do something about the ravenous felines, but something happened before they could devise a plan: one of them became sick. He fell seriously ill, so his brother took the boat and went to the mainland to get a physician. "Hurry back," the sick brother said weakly as he lay in bed. 

Can you see where this is going? An island full of hungry cats, an incapacitated man lying weak and helpless in bed? When the healthy brother returned to the island, he and the physician were horrified by what they found inside the Haskells' house. The sick brother had been ripped to shreds, and the cats were tearing the last morsels of flesh from his body. At last their hunger was sated. 

*****

It's a simple little story, but really resonates with me. It appears in Horace Beck's 1957 book The Folklore of Maine. The Maine Encyclopedia says Haskell Island was named for a Captain Haskell who purchased, but never lived on, the island, so I don't think the man-eating cat story is true. Still, it has the power of a good horror movie, and reads like an environmentalist fable. The brothers try to master the island, but end up doomed by their own actions and the invasive species they brought to the island. 

It reminds me of "Bart the Mother," a 1998 episode of The Simpsons where Springfield is overrun by ravenous lizards. At first people are happy because the lizards eat all the pigeons, but then realize they'll need to import snakes to eat the lizards, and then gorillas to eat the snakes...

Horace Beck notes that there is a coda to the story. According to some people, the sick brother was not killed by cats, but by pirates. He had seen the pirates burying their treasure on Haskell Island, and they killed him to keep their secret safe. Then they made it look like the cats had done it to deflect attention. I don't find that explanation quite as compelling, though. The story is structured like a version of "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed A Spider," and randomly introducing pirates just doesn't make sense. 

Judith Howard's Funeral: A Maine Witch Story

This legend comes from Harpswell, Maine.

Way back in the 1700s, a woman named Judith Howard lived on Sebascodegan, one of the islands that make up the town of Harpswell. Judith made her living as a healer, treating people's wounds and illnesses with various herbal remedies.

This was always a risky trade to practice in the pre-Industrial era. If your cures weren't effective you would lose clients, but if your cures were TOO effective people might think you were a witch. For example, Margaret Jones of Charlestown, Massachusetts was executed as a witch for this very reason in 1648. Talk about being too good at your job!

Judith Howard's cures were very effective, so her neighbors of course muttered that she was in witch. How else could one woman's salves and teas cure so many illnesses? Clearly the Devil must have something to do with it. Luckily Judith lived in the 1700s when people were no longer hanged for witchcraft. She suffered from social ostracization but still lived a long life.

It's often believed that female herbalists were unjustly accused of witchcraft. In many historical cases, like Margaret Jones, that seems to be true. It doesn't quite turn out that way in the legend about Judith Howard.

Most accounts of Judith's life indicate that she was good natured and kind, and didn't demand much from her neighbors. But when she died, all Hell broke loose.

On her deathbed, she had one dying wish. "Please don't bury me next to Old Lambo," she said. Old Lambo was a local Native American buried near Cundy's Harbor. The stories don't say why she didn't want to be buried next to him. Was he a rival healer, a profession many Native Americans followed? Was she a racist? Who knows? Maybe they had an affair that ended poorly. Perhaps he was buried in a pauper's grave or outside of the cemetery walls. The stories just don't say.

After Judith died her neighbors breathed a sigh of relief. They had all benefited from her cures, but they had also been spooked by living so close to someone who was possibly a witch. They put her body in a pine coffin, brought her over to Cundy's Harbor, and buried her right next to Old Lambo.

No one on Harpswell got any sleep that night. Barn doors slammed open and shut all night long. At first some people blamed the wind, but then the doors inside people's homes began slamming open and shut too. Cats ran around in the darkness, howling in agony, and less identifiable but even uncannier noises were also heard.

This went on for several nights, until one morning a group of brave Harpswell citizens went to Cundy's Harbor and dug up Judith's coffin. They carried it two miles across the island and buried her near the main road. Apparently this location was more to her liking, because the hauntings and weird apparitions stopped. Judith and the island had peace.

This is of course a legend, and not a piece of history, and it's not clear if Judith Howard even existed. However, the story does show that people believed witch's powers continued even after they died. (See the story about Hannah Cranna or the witch's grave in York for similar legends). Witches have powerful souls while they live, and their souls continue to exert strange powers even after their bodies die.

This story appears in a few different places, but I found it in Dorothy Simpson's The Maine Islands in Story and Legend (1960).